We started our discussions on Museums and Knowledge Organizations and their impact and partnerships with Native people by getting a tour at the Wisconsin Historical Museum last week. This included learning about NAGPRA and the museum history and relationships with Wisconsin native from Jennifer Kolb, the museum director and Native American liaison. The museum has a very deeply imbedded history with the Wisconsin Native tribes, starting with the first director of the museum, Charles E. Brown and continuing through Jennifer Kolb and her staff.
This week we explored more in depth different cultural institutions and their relationships with native people’s. One of great interest to my was the chapter in Amy Lonetree’s Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums, “The Ziibiwing Center for Anishinabe culture and lifeways: Decolonization, truth telling, and addressing historical unresolved grief.” I think this chapter really helped me to make many connections among what we have learned each different week in this class. I really appreciated the different perspective from a different state and indigenous group we hadn’t yet talked about in class. The article discussed how information is organized and what cultural institutions can do to make their collections more applicable and better accessible for Native people. One of the biggest things that I carried away from this part of the chapter was adding information in not only English but the Native languages of the people. This makes the information easier to access and understand for the Native people and also helps non-Native’s learn more about the culture of the land.
As we got into small groups to discuss the articles is was evident that we were all in awe of what the Ziibiwing Center is able to do for the Anishinabe people in Michigan. Because of our previous field trip to the WIsconsin Historical Museum we were able to make comparisons between the missions statements of both of these institutions. While the Wisconsin Historical Museum is a state-wide institution that has a mission statement that encompasses more than just Native Culture, the Ziibiwing Center focuses solely on the mission of providing enriching culturally information of the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan and other Great Lakes Anishinabe. Their mission statement is much more specific and related to the native peoples of their area. For more information of the Ziibiwing Center here is their link: http://www.sagchip.org/ziibiwing/
One of my favorite parts of the TLAM class is the different perspectives we get in the assigned articles as well as the background of my classmates. We have a diverse group of students studying archives, academic libraries, special libraries, public libraries, and youth services. This class period was interesting because of the different cultural institutions we studied and because of what we were able to gather in our small groups and hearing everyone else’s opinions of the missions of the cultural institutions we studied. Even though museums are not my strongest area I was able to gather a lot of interesting points and take away a lot from what my classmates had to contribute to the class discussion.
– Meg Schiebel