Race for Sale: Narratives of Possession in Two “Ethnic” Museums

Abstract

Have the Museum for African Art and the National Museum of the American Indian, both in New York City, been able to “move the center” from Euro-America to Africa, the African diaspora, or Native America?

What Matters: Seeing the Museum Differently

“…To exhibit it empty would not be desirable. Such emptiness would echo death, something vanished, a standard trope of representation of all Aboriginal people in North America (Hilden and Huhndorf 1999;Hilden 2000). The tipi needed a human presence to make it life-like to the Blackfoot team, to further highlight the idea that Blackfoot people are alive and well today.…”

“…Krmpotich (2004) offers an empirically based account of how a 21st century museum exhibition can be read by mainstream and non-mainstream visitors alike acknowledging, as have others, that interactions with museum exhibitions are highly personalized experiences (Falk and Dierking 2000). The text of the museum can be read in radically different ways by those whose ancestors once owned the objects that make up ethnographic museum collections (see Hilden 2000). My comments here are intended to further complicate any essentialized understanding of how the museum can be interpreted or as some might suggest, appropriated, by those with codes of meaning-making outside the mainstream.…”