“The People Shall Continue”: Native American Museums as Archives of Futurity

In the Western cultural archive from James Fenimore Cooper’s ‘noble savages’ to Gore Verbinsky’s 2013 reincarnation of The Lone Ranger, Indigenous American cultures have, for the longest time, been relegated to the past and framed in representations that either displace them into nostalgic folklore or declare them conveniently vanished. While non-Native cultural products such as literary texts, photographs, and paintings, as well as museum exhibitions have coded Indigenous identities as static opposites to modernity, and thus deprived them of a future in Western culture, contemporary Indigenous writers, artists, and curators use these same cultural channels to contest the semiotics of absence, to assert cultural sovereignty, and to empower alternative modes of knowledge. This article considers tribal museums as interventional archives of knowing – in Derrida’s sense of both “assigning residence or of entrusting so as to put into reserve” and of “consigning through gathering together signs” (1995/1996: 3; original emphasis). With examples from a Pueblo cultural context, including an exhibition at Disneyworld, Florida; the Sky City Cultural Center and Haak’u Museum in Acoma, New Mexico; as well as the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I trace the ways in which Native American museums strategically undermine what Mark Rifkin has termed “settler time” (2017: 9) and claim instead presence, sovereignty, inclusion, modernity, and futurity. In their specific outlines, these exhibits serve simultaneously as archives of Pueblo cultural heritage and as construction sites of temporality itself.1

A Pathway Home: Connecting Museum Collections with Native Communities

In 2016, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) and the Poeh Cultural Center, owned and operated by the Pueblo of Pojoaque in New Mexico, begin work on a loan of 100 ceramics in NMAI’s collections to the Poeh Cultural Center. Making loans to other institutions is regular practice for NMAI. In making loans to tribal museums and cultural centers, a loan can take on cultural and spiritual significance, which was the case for the Poeh Cultural Center and the community members it supports and represents. This article addresses the importance of connecting Native peoples with museum collections, which has the potential to contribute to community well-being, by featuring the partnership between NMAI and the Poeh Cultural Center.

The New World of the Indigenous Museum

Museums have long offered simplistic representations of American Indians, even as they served as repositories for Indigenous human remains and cultural patrimony. Two critical interventions–the founding of the National Museum of the American Indian (1989) and the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990)–helped transform museum practice. The decades following this legislation saw an explosion of excellent tribal museums and an increase in tribal capacity in both repatriation and cultural affairs. As the National Museum of the American Indian refreshes its permanent galleries over the next five years, it will explicitly argue for Native people's centrality in the American story, and insist not only on survival narratives, but also on Indigenous futurity.

Selected Issues Illustrating Duality in Relation to Lakota Identity

The article deals with selected issues which - as we perceive it - can provide an insight into what the Lakota consider essential and generic for their self-identification with their culture (What does it mean to be Lakota?). The study is based on observations gained during fieldwork research, and issues in the text reflect data collected within this period. As a result, we examine the following issues: tribal museums in Lakota reservations, Native perception of time, selected issues of Lakota religion, and Lakota relation to the land and environment they live in and to the world on a global scale. We believe that in all these issues we can also recognize an underlying dual structure which - in its most general meaning - could be understood as a dichotomy of Native and Western/Euro-American worldview and mind-set. The question was how non-Native elements distort or affect the system of Lakota culture. In the section on tribal museums and perception of time we have shown that circular way of thinking about the course of the world which is, according to Donald Fixico (FIXICO 2009), characteristic of all Native cultures affects the way tribal museums organize and present their exhibitions. In this case, the influence of the Native/Euro-American dualism does not have to be necessarily negative. The same can be said about another example where the dichotomy projects itself - in the issue of Lakota relation to the land or Unci Maka (Grandmother Earth): Though Lakota religion and identity is regionally bound (BUCKO 2008), their concern for this integral part of their Native-self can surprisingly well fit into the global issue of protection of environment. On the case of Lakota struggle to stop construction of a KXL pipeline1 we demonstrate how the same (Native/Euro-American) duality interacts and through which the Lakota (Native, regionallybound) voice is strengthened by its non-Native counterpart and vice versa.