Culturally Appropriate Collections Stewardship: Creating an ICC Guide

Summary

This is an abstract from the "In Search of Solutions: Exploring Pathways to Repatriation for NAGPRA Practitioners (Part IV): NAGPRA in Policy, Protocol, and Practice" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

For centuries, museums and academic institutions have acquired and amassed Indigenous cultural items for their own use and benefit with minimal consideration from descendant communities. The values expressed in stewarding those collections resonate throughout an institution. The Indigenous Collections Care (ICC) Working Group, established in 2021, advocates for stewardship approaches that privilege Native American knowledge and center concepts of culturally appropriate care for items in institutional collections. To meet these goals, the ICC Working Group is creating a Guide, which will be a reference tool for institutions that interact regularly with indigenous collections. The Guide will not teach museums how to specifically care for each item, since these vary among each community. It will instead offer achievable considerations and templates for implementation, advocacy, and creation of policies and procedures. This Guide does not replace consultation or the repatriation process – instead, it is meant to help guide those conversations and provide a framework.  The ICC Guide is contributing to and amplifying a fieldwide reimagining of how, and for whom, collections are stewarded.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• In Search of Solutions: Exploring Pathways to Repatriation for NAGPRA Practitioners (Part IV): NAGPRA in Policy, Protocol, and Practice   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38019.0