A Woman’s Place: Decolonizing Femininity Within American Indian Representations Of Women In Eastern North American Museums

Involvement of indigenous communities in the care and curation of their material culture and their stories reflects increased awareness of the shared authority between indigenous peoples and museum professionals in the sharing of their histories with the general public in the twenty-first century. Despite this progress, however, representations of the individualism and significance of Native women in cultivating their societies has been marginalized for the greater part of the twentieth century. Eurocentric perspectives of indigenous societies have long diminished the prominence of Native women in governing and maintaining matrilineal kinship networks. This study explores how the decolonization processes necessary for fostering more inclusive representations and understandings of these histories are enacted within three contemporary Eastern North American museums: The Museum of the Cherokee Indian, The Museum of the Southeast American Indian, and the National Museum of the American Indian. Museum professionals from each of these three institutions were interviewed in order to conduct a comparative analysis of the ways in which each of these public historians engage with and educate both academic and general audiences of diverse backgrounds.