What do you need from us? | What Makes a Successful Museum Land Acknowledgment?

 Some Indigenous scholars have come to regard the standard land acknowledgment as “hollow” and “not enough.”

  Rhea Nayyar October 13, 2024 | HYPERALLERGIC

The land acknowledgment at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City (photo Isa Farfan/Hyperallergic)

Exactly two years ago, Cherokee Nation citizen and Stony Brook University professor Joseph M. Pierce, now director of the school’s Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative, shared how institutional land acknowledgments “are almost never followed by meaningful action” in an opinion piece for Hyperallergic.

“What changes when an institution publishes a land acknowledgment?” he asked. “What material, tangible changes are enacted?” 

The answers to these questions still appear to elude some of the most well-attended art institutions across the United States. So much so that some Indigenous scholars have come to regard the standard land acknowledgment as “hollow,” “empty,” “performative,” and, as Pierce put it, “not enough.”

Hyperallergic looked into the land acknowledgments — or lack thereof — at 15 popular art museums and institutions in the country, and while this is by no means a comprehensive list, there’s certainly a lot to glean from the varying approaches. Some institutions have opted to incorporate land acknowledgements on their grounds. In 2021, for example, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan installed a plaque on its Fifth Avenue façade coupled with an article from the curators behind the effort contextualizing the plaque in addition to other initiatives within the museum. That same year, the Legion of Honor and de Young Museum in San Francisco installed a physical acknowledgment on an exterior wall, complemented by a detailed online text.

The Forge Project website requires visitors to physically check off acknowledgments and advocacy statements before being permitted to enter. (screenshot Rhea Nayyar/Hyperallergic via forgeproject.com)

Many museums have relegated their land acknowledgements to their websites, sometimes adding links for additional resources and using digital space for further contextualization. In New York City, the Brooklyn Museum and the Queens Museum have dedicated land acknowledgements in their “About” pages online; the Brooklyn Museum also has an acknowledgement on the footer of its website. The Whitney Museum of American Art features a devoted land acknowledgment webpage with additional context on overlapping territories and diasporic relationships, as well as links to the Lenape Center, the American Indian Community House, and the digital nonprofit Native Land.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art also presents its land acknowledgment tab in the “About” section, whereas the Philadelphia Museum of Art included one in its Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility section with links to relevant topics and past events at the museum. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston has the acknowledgement in its “Inclusion” section, directing people to visit Massachusetttribe.org.

The Art Institute of Chicago‘s digital land acknowledgment was implemented in 2019 through a live ceremony with the city’s American Indian Center, a collaborator on the endeavor. The page includes a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section that also addresses criticisms of land acknowledgments among other points of interest, including an answer to the question, “Isn’t a statement a bit hollow?” The Cleveland Art Museum‘s land acknowledgment page also includes FAQ section tackling criticisms and providing more historical context about the Native populations of the region as well as the museum’s stated commitments to Native tribes today.

Alternatively, some high-profile institutions have not included land acknowledgements on their websites. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, confirmed that it does not have a land acknowledgment in an email to Hyperallergic. The High Museum of Art in Atlanta; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan do not appear to have land acknowledgments online, nor did they immediately respond to Hyperallergic‘s inquiries. The Getty Museum and Foundation, meawhile, announced in 2021 that the development of a land acknowledgment in collaboration with relevant Indigenous leaders was in the works, and has issued a FAQs document about the timeline, process, and permissions for individual acknowledgments in the meantime.

To better understand how a land acknowledgment should be folded into more comprehensive institutional initiatives to engage with and support Native people living today, Hyperallergic checked in with Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish First Nation), executive director and chief curator of Forge Project. The Native-led nonprofit on Moh-He-Con-Nuck/Mohican (Stockbridge-Munsee) land in Taghkanic, New York, is devoted to cultivating and advancing Indigenous leadership in the arts and culture sector. 

“The way that I understand and frame a land acknowledgment is that it should be a declaration of an institution’s relationships,” Hopkins explained in a phone call. “It’s not just a declaration of people who were there on a certain land area — people who are still there. I feel like that relationship part is really key and it’s often left out of land acknowledgments.”

During a Meadow Work day in September 2023, neighbors from the region participate in and learn more about the land remediation work through the Forge Project and the Stockbridge-Munsee Community. (photo by Thatcher Keats, courtesy of Forge Project)

Hopkins elaborated that it’s the institutions that must develop relations with existing Indigenous communities in a non-extractive manner.

“You don’t go to a community who is overwhelmed and under-resourced and say, ‘Hey, we want to plan a land acknowledgment,’ — you approach them with what you can offer them in order to begin the relationship,” she said. “So that perhaps some of your institutional resources may directly benefit them. Museums often think that they can develop a relationship through programming, but I actually think that what needs to happen first is building trust and asking the question, ‘What do you need from us?’ instead of ‘What do we need from you?'”

Hopkins used the Forge Project as an example, highlighting that the organization shares 50% of the proceeds from any paid visitor tours on its grounds with the Stockbridge-Munsee Community, in addition to collaborating in ongoing research on land history and labor exploitation in the area. The Forge Project has also engaged in land remediation with the Community through the removal of invasive plant species and growth of endemic plant specimens to support original biodiversity and rekindle Indigenous knowledge and stewardship of the land.

Another point Hopkins brought up is the basis of land acknowledgments pacifying history, or failing to address the violence and brutality against the Native populations whose land institutions were built on. Many acknowledgments will state that the institution or organization is located on the “unceded, ancestral homelands” of a particular Native tribe or community without elaborating on the processes of dispossession, dehumanization, and violent expulsion.

“Oftentimes, land acknowledgments intentionally or unintentionally underscore this really violent myth of the ‘vanishing Native,’ and hardly anyone ever answers the question of ‘Why are people not here?'” Hopkins continued, highlighting that colonial histories have always centered violence in the transformation of traditional territory into property.

“Museums have been inherently extractive and there still needs to be a lot of work done in order to shift those practices at their base level,” Hopkins noted. “They shouldn’t presume that there is an interest in collaboration or a desire for a relationship simply because they’re museums. Certain Native communities may have other priorities, perhaps rooted in healthcare and education, and it’s up to institutions to understand and reflect on who benefits from forging a relationship, and what can be done outside of just programming.”

LINK: https://hyperallergic.com/957768/what-makes-a-successful-museum-land-acknowledgment/

Your Land Acknowledgment Is Not Enough

Land acknowledgment without action is an empty gesture, exculpatory and self-serving.

Joseph M. Pierce October 12, 2022  (Joseph contributed to the anthology STOLEN GENERATIONS: Lost Children, Book 3)

A protester at the Whitney Museum during the "Nine Weeks of Art and Action." Taken with permission on May 17, 2019. (photo Hakim Bishara/Hyperallergic)

n here.

You’ve probably heard one. You may have helped craft one. A land acknowledgment is quickly becoming de rigueur among mainstream cultural and arts institutions. An official will stand at a podium and announce: This building is situated on the unceded land of the XYZ people.  As if those people are not still here.  As if this all happened in the past.  He will breathe deeply and continue: We pay homage to the original stewards of these lands.  The audience will nod in agreement.  As if homage were the same as returning stolen land.

A land acknowledgment is not enough. 

Museums that once stole Indigenous bones now celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Organizations that have never hired an Indigenous person now admit the impact of Indigenous genocide through social media. Land-grant universities scramble to draft statements about their historical ties to fraudulent treaties and pilfered graves. Indeed, these are challenging times for institutions trying to do right by Indigenous peoples.

Some institutions will seek the input of an Indigenous scholar or perhaps a community. They will feel contented and “diverse” because of this input. They want a decolonial to-do list. But what we have are questions: What changes when an institution publishes a land acknowledgment? What material, tangible changes are enacted?

Without action, without structural change, acknowledging stolen land is what Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang call a “settler move to innocence.” Institutions are not innocent. Settlers are not innocent.

The problem with land acknowledgments is that they are almost never followed by meaningful action. Acknowledgment without action is an empty gesture, exculpatory and self-serving. What is more, such gestures shift the onus of action back onto Indigenous people, who neither asked for an apology nor have the ability to forgive on behalf of the land that has been stolen and desecrated. It is not my place to forgive on behalf of the land.

A land acknowledgment is not enough.

This is what settler institutions do not understand: Land does not require that you confirm it exists, but that you reciprocate the care it has given you. Land is not asking for acknowledgment. It is asking to be returned to itself. It is asking to be heard and cared for and attended to. It is asking to be free.

Land is not an object, not a thing. Land does not require recognition. It requires care. It requires presence. 

Land is a gift, a relative, a body that sustains other bodies. And if the land is our relative, then we cannot simply acknowledge it as land. We must understand what our responsibilities are to the land as our kin. We must engage in a reciprocal relationship with the land. Land is — in its animate multiplicities — an ongoing enactment of reciprocity.

A land acknowledgment is not enough.

To engage with the land on the land’s terms is an act of reciprocity. Reciprocity, rather than recognition, is what the land requires because that is what it has already given. Are you not alive, breathing, because of this land?

The land exists regardless of settler acknowledgment, which can only ever be the first step toward meaningful action. Next steps involve building relationships with that land as if it were your kin. Because it is.

First-ever Oral Histories of Indian Boarding School Survivors, Collected with Care

By Nancy Marie Spears

Two people hold hands at the oral history project site visit in Harbor Springs, Michigan. Provided photo.

They’ve come from the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. From the Ojibwe and Inupiaq. Smoke rises from bundles of sweetgrass, cedar and sage as they tell their stories of surviving Indian boarding schools. 

For some, the recounting is not new.  They bring weathered black-and-white family photos to honor relatives lost.  Others, until now, have never disclosed their still-raw childhood trauma. 

Across the country, a group of traveling Indigenous oral historians are there to listen, and to record these vital first-person narratives.  They are part of an ongoing collaboration between the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition and the U.S. Department of the Interior.  The goal is to more fully document the systemic abuse endured by generations of Indigenous people under the government’s attempts at forced assimilation that began in the 1800s and lasted for over a century.

Ramona Klein, a 77-year-old from North Dakota shared a particularly harrowing memory with the historians, tribal officials and spiritual leaders who gathered in Bismarck, North Dakota in June to support the survivors. 

She remembered a “big, green bus.” It carried Klein and her five siblings away from their sobbing mother and the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians to the militaristic Fort Totten Indian Boarding School.   When the children arrived in 1954, she said, they met a matron who meted out beatings with a wooden paddle that school staff called “the board of education.”

The first-of-its-kind oral history project, underway since March, receives and archives these memories. Three historians and a team of an additional 10 to 12 people have so far visited Indigenous communities in Oklahoma, Alaska, Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana and Michigan, and will continue their work through 2026. 

Their holistic approach recognizes that painful narratives cannot be collected without caring for the people who experienced the trauma. 

Charlee Brissette, is a Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians tribal member and a descendant of boarding school survivors. She works as the oral historian team lead. Provided photo.

“Many times people feel a sense of lightness after sharing their story,” said Charlee Brissette, a Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians tribal member and oral history project team lead. “But everybody’s story is unique, and when it comes to talking about abuse, sometimes they don’t always feel light in that moment.”

In each location, video interviews begin and end in a circle, in accordance with Indigenous practices. Interviewees share in spaces made sacred. An altar set up at each site offers traditional medicine set in an abalone shell alongside eagle and crow feathers. Participants are provided native food reflective of each region — smoked salmon and moose in Alaska and smoked trout in Michigan. Powwow songs, deerskin drumming and other performances are provided by artists including Salish Spirit Canoe Family, Osage Tribal Singers, and the Alaska Native Heritage Dancers. 

Indigenous psychologists stand by onsite, ready to suggest a pause for water or nourishment, or some time to decompress at the beading table. 

“I don’t know if I would have felt that same sense of healing in the absence of those things,” said James LaBelle. He recounted his time at two Bureau of Indian Affairs schools during his interview in Anchorage, Alaska, in May. “It would have been a stark, cold interview.”

Weaving A Thread : Linda Yamane, Kerri Dick

 Weaving a thread through the SEVEN GENERATIONS:

The Ohlone Basket Weaver Who Revived a Rumsen Artistic Tradition

Linda Yamane taught herself the intricate and nearly extinct craft over 100 years after the last Rumsen basketmakers died.

 

Isa Farfan October 13, 2024

Linda Yamane holding a coiled basket (all images courtesy Linda Yamane)

For most of her early life, Linda Yamane thought Ohlone fine coil basketry had disappeared from the world.  But when she was a Master’s student at San Jose State University, she saw a poster displaying Ohlone baskets and lists of which institutions held them. Four decades later, Yamane says, she is one of the only people practicing Ohlone coil basketry aside from her one apprentice.

Yamane, who lives in Seaside, California, is a member of the Rumsen Ohlone Tribal Community, indigenous to the Monterey Bay, Carmel River Valley, and Point Lobos area in Northern California. Ohlone refers to a linguistic association of Northern California Indigenous peoples who share languages belonging to the Penutian family.  Rumsen is one of eight linguistic communities under the Ohlone umbrella. 

KEEP READING: https://hyperallergic.com/957865/linda-yamane-ohlone-basket-weaver-who-revived-a-rumsen-artistic-tradition/

 

**

Master Chilkat weaver Kerri Dick (Kwakwaka’wakw, Haida, Tlingit, Kootenay), whose artistry fused traditional carving, weaving, and beading practices that she learned from family members and shared with her local Haida Gwaii community, died at age 41, as confirmed by her family in an announcement posted yesterday to Facebook. The cause of death has not been made public.

Kerri Dick, Chilkat Weaver of Wonders, Dies at 41

Wyoming Episcopal Church will return a tribe’s artifacts after 80 years

 By Anumita Kaur October 2024

Some of the 200 cultural items that the Wyoming Episcopal Church returned to the Northern Arapaho tribe last week. (Crystal C'Bearing)

The Wyoming Episcopal diocese has had about 200 Northern Arapaho tribal items since 1946.  On Monday, the tribe gets them back.

The Wyoming Episcopal Church is set to return about 200 cultural items to the Northern Arapaho tribe on Monday after a years-long effort by the tribe to repatriate the artifacts.

The momentous return for the Northern Arapaho comes as Indigenous activists have urged the nation to reckon with its violent history toward Native Americans. The federal government has tightened laws to return tribes’ items, cities have removed Christopher Columbus monuments, and under the Biden administration, the federal government has said the federal holiday that falls on Monday marks both Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

The Wyoming Episcopal Church possessed the Northern Arapaho tribe’s artifacts for nearly 80 years — ranging from children’s toys to bows and arrows to traditional dresses. Given to the church by a local store owner who bartered for the items, the state’s Episcopal leadership had been reluctant to return the artifacts for decades, but it shifted its stance as the tribe continued pressing for the items’ return and as the nation more broadly recognized past wrongs toward Native Americans.

It’s about time the items return home, said Jordan Dresser, a former chairman of the Northern Arapaho tribe and one of the community leaders who worked for the artifacts’ return. The Northern Arapaho reside in west central Wyoming on the Wind River Reservation.

“This is a huge win for us. This is for the future. This is us being able to hold on to our culture and our legacy. I get emotional about it, because I just never thought it was going to happen,” Dresser said. “Repatriation has become a big, hot topic in this country, but this is a battle that tribes have been fighting for years.”

The church said the items’ return is long overdue.

“We hope that their return is the beginning of reconciliation, healing and shared community between the Episcopal Church in Wyoming and the Northern Arapaho people,” said Megan Nickles, chair of the standing committee of the Wyoming Episcopal Church. “I would challenge other institutions around the world that hold sacred items to also return them home where they belong.”

The items will eventually be displayed in a museum — currently under renovation — on the Wind River Reservation, Dresser said, “where the Arapaho people can come learn about themselves.”

Beaded clothing items are some of the artifacts being returned. (Crystal C'Bearing)

Across the country, Native American tribes have fought for years to reclaim their human remains and sacred items from museums, universities and other entities.

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, passed by Congress in 1990, requires museums and federal agencies to identify and send back sacred items to their respective cultural groups. Compliance was slow — or nonexistent — and the Interior Department issued rules this year to strengthen the law, setting a deadline of five years for federally funded entities to ensure their collections comply with the law.

Following the order, several museums across the country began covering displays of artifacts from federally recognized Native American and Native Hawaiian groups as they determined whether they could obtain consent for the exhibits or would have to return the artifacts, The Washington Post reported.

This helped create the perfect storm for the Wyoming Episcopal Church to return the Northern Arapaho artifacts in its possession. The church is not subject to that law, but it further encouraged all American institutions to reevaluate what to do with artifacts they possess, Dresser said.

The Episcopal Church in Wyoming had possessed the items since 1946. Edith May Adams, who served at St. Michael’s Mission in Ethete, Wyo., ran a small market where she amassed the items as many Native residents would trade them in for necessities, the church said in a statement. Adams later deeded the collection to the church, and the church held the items for the next 78 years.

In 2012, Dresser and other tribe members approached the church to obtain some of the items for a historical display at the Wind River Hotel and Casino. At first, they were told no, Dresser said.

“There were concerns about us having capabilities of housing them. Some had issues with it being connected to a casino,” Dresser said. “We felt like at the core of it, in our hearts, we knew how to care for these items, we just didn’t have the technical expertise for it.”

Dresser went on to obtain a master’s degree in museum studies. “Just to get that foot in the door — so at least one of our tribal members has the technical expertise,” he said, stressing that the tribe “always had the cultural expertise.”

Discussions continued, and eventually the church agreed to loan the tribe about 20 items.

“Back in 2012, we were just happy with the loan,” Dresser said. “Even though, in the back of my head, I thought these should just be ours, because they are ours.”

The conversations did not stop — tribal leaders pressed forward with discussions about the ultimate return of the items to the Northern Arapaho. The tribe’s historic preservation office made repatriation a priority, and many tribal members are also members of the Episcopal Church. “They remind the church of their obligations to our people,” Dresser said.

Twelve years later, their dream is set to be realized Monday.

The approximately 200 items range widely, Dresser said. There are beaded items and figurines, but Dresser’s favorites are the rawhide suitcases. “The earliest suitcases that our people used to put things in,” he said. “They’re just beautiful.”

The tribe and church plan to gather for a ceremony honoring the items’ return.  Now, after years of dispossession, comes the best part, Dresser said: “It’s up to us what we want to do next.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/comments?storyUrl=https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/10/14/wyoming-arapaho-tribe-artifacts-return/