This week in TLAM we trekked to the other end of State Street to visit the Wisconsin Historical Museum and meet with the museum’s director, Jennifer Kolb. The visit gave us a better understanding of how museums now work with Native American bands on repatriation, problems of representation in museum exhibits, and how Native American groups can work with museums to create more informative exhibits.
Jennifer gave us an overview of how the Wisconsin Historical Museum functions and the services it provides to the public, particularly programs aimed at education and children. She explained how the ongoing protests across the street at the state Capitol have affected the daily work of Museum employees and the financial side of things at the site. Due to numerous school field trip cancellations over the fear of non-existent violence at the protests, the Museum has not experienced the same financial uptick that many area restaurants have experienced in the past few weeks. While this did not relate directly to TLAM’s class topic, it illustrated a way in which museums or other public education institutions in more urban areas could be affected by politics and civic unrest. As many of us in the class may work in the management of libraries, archives, or museums someday, this point illustrated to us a problem we may encounter someday.
After a background explanation of the Museum’s permanent exhibit on Wisconsin’s Native American history, “People of the Woodlands,” our class toured the exhibit. The exhibit has existed in a physical form for 25 years now. However, factoring in the years of planning, developing, and building the exhibit, it is closer to 40 years old. As a result, parts of the exhibit are outdated, both technologically and informationally. The treaty section in particular needs some updating, as it portrays Wisconsin Native American tribes in a negative light and deprives them of any voice in the narrative of the Prairie du Chien treaty making. A future project of the Museum will be to re-do this part of the exhibit and incorporate an Indian perspective. Another update to the exhibit would be to include more contemporary parts of Wisconsin Indian life as well as give greater labels credits to artifacts and photos in the exhibit, as well as better contextual explanations for items. We also saw an exhibit about Potawatomi Chief Kahquados and observed how museum objects, archival materials, and community input contributed to this installation.
To wrap up our visit to the Wisconsin Historical Museum, Jennifer explained to us how repatriation works and what the Museum and Historical Society has done to follow the guidelines of NAGPRA. We heard the disheartening story of a curator of the Museum who stole from collections and how the aftermath of that both strained and strengthened ties between the Museum and Wisconsin tribes. This week’s visit gave our class a greater understanding of repatriation and NAGPRA, as well as insight into how a museum can approach and collaborate with Native American groups to update and create exhibits in a culturally sensitive manner.
-Emma Zoch