Conversations on Native American Cultural Sovereignty
Getting them returned from an obscure museum outside Boston hasn’t been easy for the descendants of those slain during the 1890 massacre in South Dakota.
Source: Native Americans fight for items looted from bodies at Wounded Knee
Archival documents reveal the true origins of a popular Colorado tourist attraction.
Source: What’s wrong with the Manitou Cliff Dwellings Museum and Preserve?
More than 116,000 Native American ancestors are in limbo—their remains not yet laid to rest, but instead kept in storage at museums and institutions across the country.
Source: Tribes, Advocates Work to Fix a 30-year-old Loophole in Federal Law
The Autry and Gabrielino/Tongva Cultural Educators of the Los Angeles Basin Announce Memorandum of Understanding After years of collaboration, the Autry Museum of the American West and…
Source: He’uurore hyoo’eya horuura’ Carrying Knowledge into the Future
‘I want them to understand the great diversity we have among our tribes’
The Repatriation Files wants its readers to know of this special issue of Arts! Edited by Sascha Scott and Amy Lonetree.
Crescencio Martinez, Two Drummers (1918). Courtesy of Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Santa Fe, NM. 24157/13.
Special Issue in journal Arts: Native Survivance and Visual Sovereignty: Indigenous Visual and Material Culture in the 19th and 20th Centuries
The Iowa Native Spaces project, led by graduate students and faculty from UI’s History Corps, works closely with tribal partners to help prevent the erasure of Meskwaki and Ioway history and bring Native perspectives to more Iowans.
During American Indian Heritage Month, it is good to remember all of the excellent Native-run museums, archives, and galleries across the country that work hard to preserve cultural heritage and to educate the general public. The Heritage Center at the Red Cloud Indian School on the Pine Ridge Reservation is a great example.
In October of this year, The Heritage Center announced the acquisition of new work by Bobby C Martin (Creek), an artist, curator, and educator from Oklahoma, the Lakota artist James Star Comes Out, Tasha Abourzek (Mandan/Hidatsa), and Aloysius Dreaming Bear (Lakota), of Pine Ridge.
For those who love Native art, discovering The Heritage Center is like discovering a hidden gem. Located in the rolling hills of the Pine Ridge Reservation on Red Cloud’s historic campus—more than 100 miles from any major urban center.
From The Heritage Center’s website:
The Heritage Center collection began with the purchase of three prize-winning pieces from the Red Cloud Indian Art Show in 1969, and has grown today to include nearly 10,000 pieces of the Native American contemporary and historical Lakota art (all recently catalogued thanks to generous funding from the Institute for Museum and Library Services and the Bush Foundation). The collection includes paintings, textiles, traditional art, historical items, pottery and sculpture, as well as a library and historical archives.
The Heritage Center is one of the oldest such archives located on a U.S. reservation. It is a model of Native-centered cultural sovereignty, promoting contemporary Indian artists and crafts people, and providing a space for visitors to discover the connections between time-honored Lakota creative traditions and their 21st-century forms.
James Star Comes Out “Buffalo Doll,” Northern Plains Indian Art Market, 2015.
Directions: The Heritage Center is located on the campus of Red Cloud Indian School in Pine Ridge, South Dakota.
The Heritage Center at Red Cloud Indian School 100 Mission Drive
Pine Ridge, South Dakota 57770
A fishhook from the early half of the 19th century from the Newton Andover collection at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass. Credit Peabody Essex Museum, Deposit of the Andover Newton Theological School, 1976
Native American tribes are waiting for the return of their sacred items from the collection of a Massachusetts seminary.
Source: New Yale Partner Faulted for Handling of Tribal Artifacts
