Our Lives: Collaboration, Native Voice, and the Making of the National Museum of the American Indian (Shannon)

Abstract

Reviewed by David ShorterOur Lives is part ethnography, part museum exhibit review, partly a historical record, and collectively groundbreaking. No single text elsewhere does all that Jennifer Shannon has accomplished and with such eloquence. Building upon and giving detailed texture to previous scholarship in the museum decolonization movement, Shannon's work extends that conversation and studies both the larger structural matters of exhibiting cultures as well as the face-to-face conversations between indigenous community leaders, curators, museum visitors, and staff members. Shannon spent two years in the field, here meaning the multi-sited engagements of exhibiting and curating culture, where she refined her rich insights into the overlaps and frictions between anthropology and museology. As an adept writer with a sweeping ethnographic attention, Shannon more than achieves her goal of differentiating how museums and Indigenous peoples represent Native cultures; she additionally demonstrates how museums might best be understood as artifacts of negotiations, battles, and perhaps bittersweet concessions.

Decolonizing Museums: Toward a Paradigm Shift

“…It took almost 15 years after NAGPRA's passage for perhaps the most dramatic change to occur: the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in 2004 (Lonetree 2012, Shannon 2014, West 2016. The NMAI was the product of years of advocacy and successfully established a historical presence on the National Mall for Native American representation of their own histories and cultures (Deloria 2018).…”

The Professionalization of Indigeneity in the Carib Territory of Dominica

“…Taking seriously NMAI' s written and spoken references to Native American community members as "co-curators" of the inaugural exhibitions, I conducted ethnographic research on the process of creating the community-curated exhibitions at the NMAI, considering it as a multi-sited ethnography of museum and cultural experts. 23 In this article, I expand my theoretical approach to expertise in Native communities by developing the concept of the professionalization of indigeneity, employing a case study approach that focuses on the Kalinago. Through this framework, I show how the politics of expertise can offer an alternative perspective to the seemingly predictable and problematic characterizations of identity politics, and-when considering Native representation-the instrumentalization of identity, as some cases in Ethnicity Inc. suggest.…”

Museums and Anthropology in the Age of Engagement By Christina F. Kreps, New York:Routledge, 2020

“…These chapters allow the reader, especially one new to the field, to learn how museum anthropologists practice their work in different contexts. These chapters, though discussing a variety of case studies, arguably fall within the genre of museum ethnography, exemplified by texts such as Our Lives: Collaboration, Native Voice, and the Making of the National Museum of the American Indian (Shannon, 2014) and Extinct Monsters to Deep Time: Conflict, Compromise, and the Making of Smithsonian's Fossil Halls (Marsh, 2019).…”