Creating Histories through Collections: Native American Women and Museum Spaces

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Reckoning with Legacy Exhibits, Data, and Collections" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Museums, along with broader discipline of anthropology, are undoing significant ethical shifts as the field confronts the legacies of colonialism. In addition to rethinking how we make exhibits, label materials, and approach repatriations, we are also increasingly considering how collections were formed and their implications for whose stories were deemed worth telling. An important issue when dealing with Native American collections in North America is the intersection of colonialism and sexism and the ways this intersection may have underemphasized or erased the experiences of women in the past and present. In this paper, we address the place of women’s histories in Native American museum collections in three ways. First, we consider the choices made by field archaeologists and museum professionals in the creation of collections, specifically what was collected and how it was catalogued. Second, we review the treatment of materials once they are on the shelf to assess additional care practices. For instance, ground stone is admittedly large and heavy, but do they receive the same treatment as other bulky materials associated with men and political power? Finally, we advocate for the expansion of cultural care practices to ensure items associated with women’s histories are recognized moving forward.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Reckoning with Legacy Exhibits, Data, and Collections   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52132