(Re)Connections Through Time: Developing a model for multi-modal storytelling about Zuni Cultural Connections

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Native communities have long been excluded from the process of knowledge construction about their ancestral places. This exclusion has taken many forms: lack of voice or authority in museum excavations, curation, and exhibits; inaccessibility of collections that were removed from Native lands to geographically distant institutions or sold to collectors; the use of non-Native knowledge systems to classify and describe ancestral items; maps of ancient places that omit contemporary Tribal lands/Nations and Indigenous forms of mapping; and the use of anglicized place names that obscure Native connections. In aggregate, these systematic exclusions alienate Native people from their own history and impoverish our national understandings of the past. In this poster, we describe a collaborative project between the Zuni Cultural Resources Advisory Team and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Our work is focused on the physical process of reconnecting with ancestral collections and places and creating digital films that directly reach Zuni Pueblo community members. We hope this work will inspire the next generation of Native artists, museum curators, and cultural resource managers and provide a model for how we might confront the history of archaeological extraction and amplify enduring Indigenous histories of connection.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40182.0