by Michael Abatemarco on
NEW MEXICO’S INDIGENOUS-LED INSTITUTIONS, such as the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture, in Santa Fe, extend their expertise nationally, forging lasting partnerships with major museums from coast to coast. Diane Bird (Santo Domingo), the museum’s archivist, knows this firsthand, as she was the founding archivist for the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian. Her research and curation are integral to the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture’s recently revamped core exhibition, Here, Now and Always. The show represents a paradigm shift between cultural institutions and Native people, as museums begin to forge paths based on community curation and collaboration.
THE ORIGINAL Here, Now and Always showcased many of the objects from our collection. It complemented them with having guest Native curators from the many tribes of the Southwest and showcasing their voice.
It was groundbreaking: the emphasis on Native people today, not just as history. It’s very much a contemporary exhibition in a state museum that gave voice to many, many Native Americans.
This time, we still have a representative number of objects from our collections, probably within the same amount of space, but it’s a little bit more expansive.
Museums are now doing more outreach to Native peoples. I just finished reading a review for a museum in Colorado and how they had to close down one of their exhibits on Sand Creek. They got remarks from the tribes about things that were incorrect. After consultation with the tribes, they reopened with their involvement.
One of the kinds of things that museums never addressed in the past was that there were Native peoples still alive in their areas. I like to let people who fly into Albuquerque know that they literally passed through seven Native nations on their way to Santa Fe and that right now they’re standing on Indian land.
Read more: A poet who grew up in Shiprock learned from her elders how to tell stories.