 of the Portland Sustainability Series. My name is Meg Ray, I'm the Science and Technology Librarian here, and I'm one of the co-hosts with Jessica Burton, the Executive Director of the Southern Maine Conservation Library. And I'm pleased to kick off tonight's event with all the acknowledgement. Acknowledgement is a simple way of showing respect and a step toward correcting the stories and practices that are raised in indigenous peoples' history and culture and toward inviting and honoring the truth. We would like to begin by acknowledging that the land on which we gather is the occupied and unceded territory of the Wabanaki, the people of the place where the sun first looks our way. We have stewarded this land throughout the generations. We extend our respect and gratitude to the many indigenous people and their ancestors whose rich histories and vibrant communities include the Wabanaki, Malisete, Mi'kmaq, Kassel and Wadi, and perhaps Wabt nations, and all the native communities who have lived in Chua Bunkig for over 3,000 generations in what is now called New England and the Canadian Maritimes. We thank them for their strength and resilience in protecting this land and aspire to uphold our responsibilities according to their example. Portland Sustainability Series is a monthly event here. It's on the fourth Wednesday of every month. Next month we'll be meeting the first week of December due to the Thanksgiving holiday, and we're excited to have Troy come to talk to us about the project he's doing in the South Portland. Before I head in over to Jess to do the introduction, part of my job is obviously thinking about sustainability and what that means. And in the past year, the American Library Association actually adopted sustainability for the core values, intellectual freedom and educational things like that are sort of what people think about when they think about librarianship. But I'm talking this from their website today because I thought that it was really perfect for tonight's event. ANA is supporting the library community by showing its commitment to assisting in the development of sustainable libraries for the addition of sustainability as a core value of librarianship. This consists of practices that are environmentally sound, economically feasible, and socially equitable. Libraries play an important and unique role in promoting community awareness about resilience, climate change, and sustainable future. Thank you. One housekeeping note, there is an event in the Louis Gallery this evening, so as you've said, just ask that you take a right through reference and go up the stairs and elevators there. So without further ado, just to do the introduction. Thanks, Meg. I also give a big thanks to the ProLocal Library for co-posting this series, The Sustainability Sense. I think we're in our third or fourth year and we have had just an amazing variety of speakers. I would also like to thank our co-sponsors for this event tonight and fellow collaborators who helped ensure that we could present this full evening to all of you. And those organizations include the Nature Conservancy of Maine, Maine Coast Heritage Trust, Maine Initiatives, the Foundation for Portland Public Schools, and the Telling Room. Showing you or community that all of these different organizations can find opportunities to partner and to do so in support of the Wabanaki is a wonderful outcome of this event. So thank you to all of you from those organizations that are here with us tonight. This other Maine Conservation Co-op is a network of 22 land and water conservation organizations committed to making the conversation about conservation broader, acknowledging and acting upon the wide connections and relevancies for greater impact in healthier communities. And we are especially committed to building a more equitable, inclusive, and diverse conservation movement. Maine celebrates its 200th year in 2020. There is a lot to celebrate about the people and the projects of this state, especially from the last year. However, we know that Maine was founded on stolen land. And we know that Maine was the last state in the country to give voting rights to indigenous people. We also know that the impact on native cultures from their disposition of land is devastating. Loss of language, identity, chronic health issues, internalized racism, ghost and lost generations. These facts create an enormous opportunity for reckoning. Big changes in our behavior and action are possible through acknowledgment of injustices. Conservation has a role in supporting the Wabanaki sovereignty. We have a responsibility as stewards of this place to deepen our understanding of what decolonizing conservation might look like. Tonight, I am excited to learn about a different yet similar process. We are pleased and honored to present tonight's event. And we welcome Star Kelly. Thank you so much. Star is the curator of education at the Abbey Museum. Her responsibilities focus on education through dialogue in a decolonizing context. Star leads the museum to education and public programs work, including program development and delivery, teacher training, and educational resource development. She is a member of the Algonquin First Nation of Kitigan, ZB, Anish, no, I'm sorry, Anish Naman in Quebec. Star has worked as a middle and high school social studies teacher and is a social justice oriented educator, developing what she refers to as curriculum for dignity. Her lessons and pedagogical approach put theory into practice by honoring those she teaches about, while simultaneously creating an environment which is responsible to the needs of her learners and dignifies her students' lived experiences. Star is committed to language and cultural revitalization efforts in indigenous communities. She is a traditional bead worker in both flat and raised beadwork mediums and enjoys hiking and live music. In her spirit, it's from the website, yes. Star is a member of the main archives and museum service. She serves on both the programs and communications committees. Some people say we have a lot to approach her in this talk. And Kat and I welcome and thank you so much. Hi everybody, thank you. Hopefully you can hear me in the back. I like being a little bit further away from the mic, but I want to thank you all for coming out here and I want to thank all the sponsors for inviting the Abbey to be part of this series. I'm really excited to be able to talk about the work that I do and the work that my museum does and an emerging type of work within the museum field. And we'll of course delve into that, but we also have a land acknowledgement that we read at the beginning of all of our events. This land acknowledgement is actually an extension of our decolonizing process. It took about two years to produce. We produced a collaboration with our Native Advisory Council. It was a very deliberate choice that was led by Native people at the table deciding on the language that they wanted to consider around how we acknowledge the land, how we recognize the land, and how we recognize the violence that has been perpetrated against the land and against Wabanaki peoples. And so I'm going to begin my section with the Abbey Museum land acknowledgement. We are in the homeland of the Wabanaki, the people of the dawn. We extend our respect and gratitude to the many Indigenous people and their ancestors whose rich histories and vibrant communities include the Abbanaki, Malis seat, McMac, Pasamaquoddy, and Penobscot nations and all of the Native communities who have lived here for thousands of generations in what is now known today as Maine, New England, and the Canadian Maritimes. We make this acknowledgement aware of the continual violations of water, territorial rights, and sacred sites in the Wabanaki homeland. The Abbey is honored to collaborate with the Wabanaki as they tell their own stories. And you'll see a lot of institutions now adopting different land acknowledgements. And I think it is an important step in the right direction. But as Meg mentioned, it's like one step, right? It's only like a beginning step in that in fact, a lot of what the work that needs to be done is a lot deeper than just acknowledging the land. So I wanted to talk to you a little bit about who I am and how I came to do this type of work and help kind of shed some light on how I actually approached the colonization both within the classroom, within museum education, and then as to the museum world as a whole. So I am a citizen of Kyrgyzstan and Sibianishnabek. I actually grew up in Southern Maine. My family moved here in the 90s and I'm a Portland High graduate. So I'm happy to be back in the area. I love it here. I did go to Colgate University in Central New York where I graduated with an undergraduate degree in Native American Studies and then went on to get my Masters of Teaching at Colgate with a concentration in secondary social studies education. That particular program is really focused on a social justice-oriented pedagogical approach in the classroom and so I really attribute a lot of the ways I think about museum education to that background that I have inside the classroom. My graduate thesis work was around decolonizing methodologies for Indigenous education, really focused on how Indigenous people can self-determine the needs that our students need in our own classrooms. And then of course I have some classroom experience working both at Santa Fe Indian School in New Mexico and then in Central New York as well. A quick overview of what I'm going to be speaking about tonight. First thing first, I have to define decolonization as hard as it is to create a really clear definition of something that's really broad and really always changing especially to the needs of what's happening today. I am going to attempt to help you understand and grapple with what we mean by decolonization at the Abbey Museum and how other scholars have come to think about this work as well. I'll also be, we'll be considering the background of the history of museums as colonizing forces as perpetrators of a great violence against Indigenous peoples and we'll also be thinking about museum decolonization methodology and the ways in which this shows up at the work being done at the Abbey Museum. And then of course we'll be talking about a little bit about how I like to incorporate it into museum education and then the implications for all of us. Everybody in this room has ties to how history is remembered and how we tell stories and share stories and so I'll be sharing a little bit about how I think all of us in this room can start to consider decolonization on a really broad scale. So before we get much further let's talk about what it is we are talking about. Decolonization is not an easy definition to create as it's really determined by the local tribal communities and histories and the practice of the local histories and the practices that have been done by various institutions. But when done properly each organization will reflect decolonization in very different ways. At the Abbey Museum we use the work of Amy Lone Tree who wrote Decolonizing Museums in 2012 and she writes that museums can be very painful sites for native peoples as they are intimately tied to the colonization process. And when we look when we look at the ways in which museums are connected to the colonization process it's really evident how these practices continue to harm indigenous peoples today. Susan Miller is a seminal scholar working primarily in archaeology and as she was considering what decolonization would mean within an archaeological context she actually attempted to define it and she describes decolonization as a process designed to shed light and recover from the ill effects of colonization. And together tonight we'll be speaking about these ill effects in the museum spaces and looking at the establishment of collecting institutions as agents of settler colonialism. So right here I actually am providing you with the current Abbey Museum definition of what decolonization actually means. This is a working definition meaning that it is not set in stone it's meant to be continually looked at and continually considered depending on where the work kind of is led by our native advisory council. And so our current definition is decolonization means at a minimum the sharing of authority for the documentation and interpretation of native culture. Decolonizing practices at the Abbey are collaborative with tribal communities privilege native perspective and voice and include the full measure of history ensuring truth telling. And in all honesty I think we're already outgrowing this definition. We haven't necessarily had that conversation yet but just reflecting on it in preparation for today I was looking at this and I was thinking about this idea of sharing authority and how even now the Abbey is thinking about it beyond just this idea of documentation and interpretation, right. This idea that authority needs to be shared at every level of the museum especially a museum like the Abbey in order to actually realize the goals of decolonization. And at this point I do want to delve into the history of museum representation of indigenous peoples so that we can understand why there is a need for decolonizing methodologies now and understand that the histories of of collecting institutions and in particular of museums really they owe a great they owe a lot to indigenous peoples understanding that a lot of these places have created a tremendous amounts of wealth and created collections based on the theft of many indigenous objects. So the history of museum representation of native peoples begins with the development of anthropology as an academic field and while there are museums that have existed in earlier histories modern day representation stems from the late 19th and 20th century anthropologists who are making their careers of systematically collecting American Indian material culture. This was at a time too where Indians were thought to be a vanishing people from the landscape so in this gap the academy anthropologists were creating our understanding of native people. These were not informed by indigenous perspectives but were in fact from a colonizing perspective. Large collecting institutions such as the Smithsonian which was founded in 1846 the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology at Harvard and New York's Museum of Natural History and of course Chicago's Field Museum all were the primary initial big collectors of Native American material cultures. All these institutions were very aggressive collectors for example the Smithsonian's collection grew from 550 items in 1860 to more than 13,000 items in 1873. So within 13 years it's exponentially growing and when we think about this time in history we have to really consider what's happening in the United States around that time and we have to understand what's happening in the field of anthropology it's this exploding field of study which if you're familiar you know this idea of kind of collecting these objects to store away from their original context and the implications this will have for Indigenous people are huge. And at this time we also see museums particularly really natural history museums actually creating systems of classification so these are going hand in hand different types of classifications if you've ever been to a natural history museum you've probably seen the halls of the American Indian or you're looking at the large megafauna right the extinct megafauna almost right next to the Hall of American Indians and so you can start to understand how museums are actually already starting to create a narrative right they're connecting this idea of extinction of disappearance of Indigenous peoples to these ideas of extinction of megafauna from the Ice Age. So simultaneously during the rise of anthropology we also have detrimental Indian policy occurring in this country which sought to destroy the sovereign rights of tribes through the Dawz Act the creation of the boarding schools for forced assimilation the outlying of specific Indigenous ceremonies and religious traditions and the attempt to physically relocate tribes and of course the creation of the reservation system. And so when we're looking at that time of of museum collections growing this is when the federal government is really attacking Indigenous sovereignty. Anthropologists and collectors were entering communities when they were at their most vulnerable often taking advantage of the situation to extract as much as they physically could to put into storage. They sought to collect the authentic from a people they saw as vanishing and on the brink of extinction. I can't go any further without actually recognizing some of the the gravest violations that museums have participated in and it's hard for me to talk about sometimes in all honesty when we consider that museums have participated in the taking and storing of our ancestors. I don't necessarily enjoy sharing this history but I really think it's important because not everybody always considers it when they're when they're thinking about museums and the kinds of violence that has been perpetrated against Indigenous people. So Amy Lone Tree again she's a Ho-Chunk scholar and she wrote Decolonizing Museums which I highly recommend. She writes in her book that modern anthropology and archaeology and museum practice was founded in great part to violating human rights. And she's referring to this taking of the ancestors and what she's referring to the taking of human remains and putting them into museums for study. So at the same time that native objects are being collected so too are human were human remains especially during the early 19th century when scholars began using human remains to explain physical and cultural differences between peoples. The collecting of Crania was a popular was popular among scholars who attempted to relate intelligence, personality and character to skull and brain size. And of course this was a study this study relates to this sorry, I lost my son my place. These cranial measurements were used to validate white supremacy and also helped to helped with in the study of eugenics and really took off in the late 19th century and continued until and through World War II. The taking of our ancestors is very much tied to the scientific basis of racist structures in this country and it does help to legitimize or an attempt to legitimize the colonization of these lands. Franz Boas who was one of the founding individuals within cultural anthropology was known for really well known for collecting the oral traditions of Northwest Coast tribes but he also collected a great number of bodies and he often wrote about robbing graves after dark and taking really detailed notes in his field journal. So this meant that this practice was being institutionalized it was being normalized and that he was openly sharing it with his colleagues. So he was talking about the he was actually taking notes about about these thefts from from the land that he was taking. And during his early days alone he collected approximately 100 complete skeletons 200 skulls and mostly sold these to the Field Museum in Chicago and later parties in Berlin Germany. And of course I'm not sure how familiar everybody in the audience is with the Native Graves Native sorry Native Graves and Native American Graves and Repatriation Act that was passed in 1990. But when this was actually being passed it was an attempt to help repair some of the the damage that had been done among collecting parties and especially considering the repatriation of ancestors and ancestral burial goods to communities that needed these to be returned and returned back to the earth. But at that time in 1990 it was estimated that museums federal agencies and private collectors held about 2.5 million Native American bodies and untold millions of cultural objects in their storage areas. And to this day it remains to be estimated that about half a million Native American individuals are still held in U.S. collections and an equal number are held in European collections. So there's still quite a number of ancestors still being held in these institutions. And I can't underplay how incredible how incredibly harmful this is and these particular practices have been and still do cause a lot of harm within our communities. And when you consider that even after death we are not safe and that we can be violated once we are put to rest it's no wonder that there's a lot of distrust between Indigenous communities and the museum field. And when we consider the full completion of our lives as Indigenous people that is like the final step. That's how you complete your life cycle and to be disturbed from that is really damaging for us. And I often say like if we can't see the eye-dye on the sanctity of like my ancestors who need to be returned then decolonizing efforts really can't move forward from that. Like this is the baseline, right? I need you to see me as a human being. I need you to see my ancestors as a human being. And then we can start talking about everything else that should be done within an institution. And many institutions that do come to ask the Abbey about how and where they should start within a decolonizing framework I often and my other colleagues will often ask like are you compliant with NAGPRO, right? Are you receiving federal funds? Are you required to engage in repatriation of ancestors, people? And if they haven't then that's the first place you start, right? That's the first place where you can even think of gaining any sort of trust any sort of starting place with communities in their areas. I wanted to also take a moment to consider how decolonization actually came to be as an idea for self-determination and where those roots really lie. I personally can't separate the importance of the American Indian Movement and the rise of decolonizing efforts within the museum field. As a result of the American Indian Movement acts like the American Indian Religious Freedoms Act which sought to protect indigenous religious practices for the first time in 1978 and of course the Indian Child Welfare Act. This movement had huge implications for indigenous peoples and indigenous communities who were fighting for self-determination within their communities. Understanding that during this time in the 1970s people were pushing to take control of education. Understanding that we need to be able to educate our own children and set our standards for ourselves. Physical occupations of spaces like Alcatraz and Wundidney were responsive and proactive measures towards self-determination among indigenous peoples and people really started to think about this not just within education, not just within tribal law, not just within all the various aspects of life but people started to also think about museums and how museums have historically taken on narrative control of who indigenous peoples are and understanding that this was a time when people also were starting to question how objects ended up in museum collections. I also want to recognize the work of indigenous artists who have and continue to challenge museum displays of native peoples and cultures and despite the American Indian Movement museums have been incredibly slow to this change and incredibly slow to rethinking the process in which indigenous peoples are put on display and the ways in which ancestors are put on display and the way in which cultural material is put on display. And so native performers like James Luna here on over there on the left, he really rocked the art world when he did this. He put on a performance piece called Artifact in which he actually laid himself out on display and so he had himself on in a very large case and he had various items out in other cases next to him, various parts of his material culture. He had a pack of cigarettes, he had his baseball cap, he had a rattle that was important to him. He also had his divorce papers out on display and so to consider and to kind of turn on ahead what we think of as material culture, what do we think of as authentic Indian culture, he wanted to, all of the visitors in the audience to really consider like what do we mean by that? What do you, what does the audience expect from an indigenous person, from an indigenous material culture, right? He, when he was on display, he did not interact with anybody, he was just laid out there. He had various labels describing all sorts of scars and how he got them throughout his life and people often were disturbed, they didn't always understand why he was doing this, but he, he did this at a very interesting institution. He actually did this at the San Diego Museum of Man which has a very long and complicated histories around displaying ancestors, so actual human remains of James, James's ancestors. And so for him to do this so early on in 1987, I really think it sparked a lot of conversations within the museum field and within the art field and it even was later revisited by Erica Lord in which she also did that again to consider as much, has there been a lot of change within, within the museum field around these really important issues. So identifying the issues with museum history is an important aspect of understanding the need for decolonizing methodologies so that museums are no longer harmful spaces for native peoples. And can we imagine new futures for museums in which indigenous knowledge and perspectives are centered a place where we control our own stories and are able to address traumas that have happened in the past. Really early work that has been done around these methodologies and where they're kind of stemming from actually come from this one book on the left, The National Museum of the American Indian Critical Conversations by Amy Lone Tree and Amanda Cobb. These had various essays inside in which people within the National Museum of the American Indian and outside were discussing how this brand new museum at the time both succeeded and how it did not in attempting to create something new within the museum field around around native museums. And then secondly, I do want to mention decolonizing museums. Dr. Lone Tree's work has fundamentally fundamentally shifted the Abbey Museum and has definitely been the basis from which we are working. So we really do rely heavily on her frameworks that she established in this book, Decolonizing Museums. But she in this book in 2012, she really delves deeper into the subject with a focus on exhibits. And she looks at various museums and really tries to evaluate where they are kind of on the scale of decolonization and includes the importance of understanding the historical relationship between indigenous peoples and museums. So she's also a really big advocate of understanding the history of museums so that we can build better institutions that are no longer harmful. And so right here, we actually offer the framework that Amy Lone Tree puts out. And there are certainly museums across the United States and even around the globe that are incorporating decolonizing practices and through their operations. But what we found as an institution when we wanted to take this on, I even found this document a couple of days ago, there's a lot of research that we wanted to do. We wanted to know if people were already doing this or not. We wanted to see where they were on the kind of the scale of decolonizing work and really what we found and what I read in those documents is that the Abbey found that most of the decolonizing work that has been done and is still being done is mostly within the realm of exhibits. And that's it. So the things that the public, you are gonna see when you enter into a space. And so a lot of that really has to do with collaboration. So, oh yeah, we worked with this tribe. So we're a decolonizing museum, right? Like this is a really good exhibit that, you know, and so yeah, of course we're decolonized. But instead what Amy is arguing for and what we are as an institution arguing for is that all of these areas of decolonizing work need to go beyond just exhibits. And while we are certainly concerned with exhibits, at the Abbey as well, we're looking at all of our operations. So we're looking at governance structures. We're looking at hiring practices. We're looking at collections management. We're looking at educational programming, our development team, how do we fundraise for money, and of course looking forward to creating like new decolonizing pathways. So Amy identifies three elements of decolonizing methodology. The first collaboration, the second privileging indigenous perspectives and voices, and the third truth telling. So by collaboration, again borrowing from Amy, this really means a true collaboration between tribal partners and the Abbey Museum. And when we think about how exhibits, for example, are conceived, are we already creating an exhibit and then getting permission to put it on display? Are we actually creating exhibits in conjunction with people from the communities? Are we thinking about the types of collaboration around educational events that people want to see us do? And are we thinking about the collaborative needs that are threaded throughout the life of a project? And so at every stage of a project, are we still continuously engaging Wabanaki nations? So the way that we really think about this is a lot of people will think about exhibits around consulting. So instead we want to look beyond just consultation into real power sharing and understanding that all our projects and all of the operations of the museum really should be collaborative and really should be about seeding that the power that museums traditionally have had and thinking about ways in which we can start building paths forward for power sharing. The privileging of a native voice and perspective, this second characteristic is actually this idea of how vast amounts of writings have already been produced from white colonizing perspectives, but is it possible to have a space that is a Wabanaki voice or is coming from a Wabanaki perspective or a space that is privileging Wabanaki voices so that all the different narratives of Wabanaki history and experiences here in their own homeland can be coming from them themselves? And then of course truth telling that really gets at this idea of understanding that the histories of Wabanaki people, the issues of today are very much connected to traumas that have happened historically among Wabanaki peoples and understanding that we as an institution have a really big responsibility to be really truthful in our telling of history and that we don't want to gloss over difficult issues and that it's really important for us to tell that full measure of history. I do want to say when we think about this particular framework when you're following a framework like this you have to embrace a lot of the complexity that comes with it and you really have to get comfortable with unfinished business and learning to work in the gray because there aren't a lot of institutions doing this a lot of it just comes from listening to people and understanding that there are no manuals for doing this work and even for me to even consider us writing a manual it would never work anywhere else like we can share our experiences but it's always going to be very very different depending on your institution your history with the communities and of course just the communities themselves what do communities want out of a partnership with somebody like the Abbey Museum? So questions that the Abbey needed to consider when creating new spaces like our permanent exhibit how can Wabanaki stories be centered in our spaces? How can we interweave various perspectives from within communities to tell a more dynamic story of history which contemporary issues should be highlighted in these spaces which stories do we not have the authority to share? Because sometimes it is about people making hard lines saying you know you don't have the right to share that story that's something that we need to share and that's something for us but not necessarily for the public and it's about being okay when people say no to you and historically within museums we've always thought oh information is for everybody these stories are for everybody you don't necessarily have the right to tell us no but when we think about the heart of decolonizing work and we think about the fact that self-determination is very much linked to that that sovereignty is very much linked to this process then we have to consider that there are going to be times when we don't have the authority to share certain stories and of course what are our responsibilities to Wabanaki nations in all of our spaces and in particular we wanted to think about developing decolonizing methodologies just beyond exhibits so some areas of considerations that we wanted to include were collections operations governance our strategic planning programming and events advocacy and fundraising and we now as an institution have created a commitment towards decolonizing practice and all of this is available online on our website but in our strategic plan we did adopt an institutional mandate to continue this work of decolonizing and so a lot of the part of decolonizing is being transparent so understanding that when we say that we're committing to something like this we actually need to have this accessible to everybody online and so understanding that even in the process you can kind of check off where we are in our strategic plan some more recent outcomes of our decolonizing methodology actually has to do around our governance protocol which is always evolving and later I'll share how I think that this is going to be one of the biggest areas of change in the coming year we also adopted a religious appropriation and spirituality practice protocol and we've also been doing a lot of work around archaeology so the history of the Abbey Museum in particular is very much linked to archaeology and as we already discussed there's been a lot of harm done by the archaeological field and archaeological museums which the Abbey Museum started out with and so with that we used to run a field school we used to have archaeological events that people would come to and to understand that as an institution we decided not to be an archaeological museum we decided to be a museum that goes beyond just that multi-discipline area as I like to think about it understanding we have this really great quote that archaeology is only one way of understanding the world and that instead we should be incorporating all these other really wonderful ways of understanding the world so history, anthropology, yes and of course oral stories, art, like these are all like the various aspects of our lives and it makes for such a more interesting and dynamic story and it really helps with various avenues in which Wabanaki people can come and help share their own stories the way that they want to share them and so what I was trying to get at was so we moved beyond just archaeology and thinking about ways in which archaeology kind of has to take a backseat at the museum currently but thinking also that there are indigenous archaeologists and how can we work with indigenous archaeologists to work on the kind of research that they want to put on and so we actually put together just recently last weekend I was just there at our Archaeological Advisory Committee in which we are considering new ways forward around research and around utilizing the archaeological materials we already have so we have a lot of archaeological materials that haven't even been studied yet and so creating opportunities for Wabanaki professionals to start going through some of those collections instead of continuously taking up more and more stuff that's not the point anymore so I wanted to quickly, since I am a museum educator I wanted to think about decolonizing framework within a museum education lens and of course utilizing Dr. Lone Tree's framework we understand that collaboration of course is really important so in the educational department we want to highlight Wabanaki expertise by having individuals lead their own programs in abbey spaces and beyond and also understanding this second one it's kind of been like bubbling up a little bit in my head I've been trying to think about the ways in which especially lately how to be a trusted partner to Wabanaki people, how when individuals in the communities who often do a lot of educational outreach are coming to me and saying oh you know I don't have enough time to answer all these teachers' emails but I know I can trust you and I know that I can send them to you or give them your email that's a really incredible moment right but you know that they can trust you to be a resource for educators and for various districts within the state and so that collaboration is really really important and it is based on trust and it is an understanding that we have a responsibility to help alleviate some of that workload because people within the communities are you know they get a lot of emails for programming and for helping with various projects throughout the state and then also the need for museum education to really understand the ways in which we can humanize the past and the ways in which often the history of indigenous peoples are almost the center of the story but how can we actually weave stories that are both present and of the past and the ways in which we can make really dynamic conversations and really facilitate wonderful responsive conversations around contemporary issues and understanding that they are very much linked to the colonial past so if we're talking about water rights or if we're talking about indigenous Native American mascots you know we understand that these have really long deep historical implications and so I always try to think of ways in which we can really prioritize Wabanaki perspective but also think about the dignity that is really required within this work to think about how we talk about the past and of course truth-telling I'm a really big advocate for truth-telling and for considering how our programming can really help people unpack issues around settler colonialism and around issues of sovereignty I find that for the most part the general public aren't really familiar with thinking about sovereignty and thinking about Wabanaki nations or other tribal nations as sovereign entities with their own government and their own needs for self-determination and so a lot of my work is really about helping people get comfortable talking about that and at least opening a door for you to continue your own education around those issues A lot of my other work actually is still within classrooms I'm really happy I get to still work with a lot of teachers and I still get to work with districts I'm working really closely with Portland Public Education right now and in particular they have a really great collaborative approach which I'm really impressed by in which they are working very closely with representatives from Wabanaki nations but I thankfully have been also invited to at least help relieve some of the burden of educating teachers as well and so a lot of what I consider for classroom education and thoughts around curriculum structure actually comes from my experience in the classroom and a lot of my frustrations with being a social studies educator when I was educating I often I tell the story a lot but I would get really tired at the end of any unit because then you're getting prepared for the next unit and I started realizing at the end of the day that I was just teaching empire after empire after empire I was a world history teacher and it was really frustrating and I couldn't understand that of all of the centuries of history that we have as human beings that the only thing worthy of discussing were empires around the world that this was like the pinnacle of all human achievement right just these empires and so it took a lot out of me and but it also helped me understand like I can kind of see why that why that's happening right and and to understand that there is a need to really consider how we even structure our curriculum today and so people will ask me can we decolonize education, classroom education and sometimes I want to say I don't know we can't do it until we actually consider the structure in which we're building around it if I have to teach about the Greeks and then the Romans and then the Mongol Empire and then the empires of China and then you know and then all around the world like it's just these these kind of pinnacles of civilization and the the idea that the only civilizations worthy of discussion are our our empire civilizations so I I like to at least get those conversations started with educators to consider how we talk about settler colonialism and empire building within within the classroom and I often use this painting for what I what we call visual thinking strategies in which we think about you know how do we remember the past you know this is called the the vandal sack the sacking of Rome and it it it depicts the the vandals they're a group of Germanic peoples actually you know destroying Rome right and so going through this an exercise like this with educators is really powerful really kind of helps us understand the ways in which empires are very much glorified and so thinking about the implications for all of us in this room like I I think it's really powerful for all of us to consider how we remember in public and it's incredibly powerful and it has um it surrounds us every day even if we don't necessarily know it and whether we're looking at historical markers or we're looking at local histories we can see how colonization has impacted the ways in which we remember indigenous peoples and how indigenous peoples are seen today so how we remember indigenous peoples are very much connected to whether or not we actually see the the humanity within native peoples today and their presence today following a different presentation I did James Francis from Penobscot Nation recommended this book and I also recommend it to you it's called Firsting and Lasting and it's a revealing overview of historical accounts in New England and what we find are that many markers and local narratives denote the firstings me including the the first colonial homes the first Christian churches the first white settlements and on the flip side a lot of places in New England often commemorate or remember the lastings so the last native settlement the last Native American lived in this home and it really does color the way in which we understand indigenous presence in New England in particular this book highlights how indigenous peoples are written out of existence in New England and further highlights the phenomenon of quote the vanishing Indian which I would argue has been has a really strong foundation in a place like Maine often understanding that a lot of people that I know come to my museum and I'm sure a lot of the other institutions in this area don't understand that indigenous people still live here in Maine and that there are still communities and there are still nations here in Maine and our O'Brien articulates the ways in which local histories in New England become the primary means for European Americans sorry to own their own modernity while simultaneously denying it to indigenous peoples erasing them erasing them and then memorializing indigenous peoples also serves a pragmatic goal within a settler colonial system by denying the continued existence of indigenous peoples the settler society can then refuse Indian claims to lands and rights I just have one more story to share and then a couple last thoughts and then I can take some questions and this is a personal story I was recently traveling in California and I got to visit this San Diego Museum of Man and I want to note that since that James Luna's piece and most recently the San Diego Museum of Man has actually been doing a lot of really incredible work especially around decolonizing work and around the removal of ancestors from display and that has been a really good move forward in the right direction and they actually are really doing some interesting work around consent whether or not they actually mandated that if they were to take on new collections from indigenous peoples from the state of California they need written consent from those nations to add more things to their collection and so some really interesting things but as I was visiting I did go to their museum because I wanted to see it for myself and I was really excited to see another museum working within a decolonizing practice and within this framework and I was going through their new exhibit and I was really struck by the story of Otabanga he was a man who was purchased and put on display in St. Louis and later in the Bronx Zoo and it's a really gripping story of the colonial gaze and the inhumanity of what happens when we other people and I had a really visceral reaction to his story and his experiences in life and knowing that such occurrences were not uncommon during that era and still have a lot of it still continues to kind of play out among colonized peoples like really struck me and so those same labels that were used for somebody like Otabanga and for indigenous peoples you know labels like savage or cannibal, uncivilized they have real life like they have real life consequences today and I knew that I wanted to learn more about his life and so I captured this panel because I wanted to learn more about him and as soon as I took this photo a woman and her partner actually approached and the woman she looked at the photo and she started to laugh and she pointed to Otabanga's sharpened ceremonial sharpened teeth and she explained you know look at that and she was laughing but it was also like a little bit of discussed kind of mixed in and my heart shattered like just thinking about even in death he's not safe from that gaze and that this is like a really great story to especially within the context of this exhibit it was a story that had to be shared like it was really really important but understanding that not all museum audiences are necessarily ready because a lot of museum audiences and the general public are so conditioned to seeing the uncommon the strange in museum spaces and the fact that like we have a responsibility as museum curators as museum professionals to create this new normal right and we have a responsibility to understand and prepare people for more critical engagements within our spaces and I'm really I'm glad that they included this story despite that awful experience for me in that space but following that I just I really understand the need to to normalize this new way of storytelling in museums and I'm of the belief that museums aren't necessarily just spaces for collecting and displaying objects and instead I strongly believe that they are sites of memory and that they're sites of storytelling and that objects can help us tell stories but they're never more important to people and that these stories really have ways to move us forward and push us as fellow human beings into new ways of thinking and considering the harmfulness that some of these some of these structures have for for colonized people so some last thoughts around around decolonization and this work it is emergent work like I mentioned before and there is no clear path forward for the Abbey Museum or any other institution doing this type of work however it's also kind of exciting not to know what the right answer is and the fact that we can test out things and if it doesn't work out or if we're being told like you know that doesn't work for you know anybody from the community is saying like this doesn't work for us I don't think we should do it doing it this way I think it's really it's really nice to know that we can say okay let's reevaluate and we're all on the same page we know that our goal is the same right that we want to create these these better safer spaces for Wabanaki peoples and we want to create these spaces that are gonna help people understand Wabanaki history and culture in this area I also added under areas of growth this idea of governance so how do museums actually govern themselves how how are they structured at the Abbey we do have a traditional board we also have a Native Advisory Council two representatives from each of the tribal nations in Maine are actually appointed by their elected governments and they sit on this board and they try and help us with various issues within the museum but currently the Board of Trustees and this Native Advisory Council are two separate entities and so now it's this really interesting thing where we're trying to figure out maybe we don't need two separate or maybe there are better ways in which the two governing bodies can work together and of course we don't have the answers yet but I really see this in particular being where the most growth is going to happen around decolonization in our institution this year probably within the next couple years just probably a month and a half ago now we the Board of Trustees actually decided to no longer have the traditional president and vice president roles and instead they've decided to have two co-leaders of the Board of Trustees and they decided that it would be good for the one co-leader to always be a Wabanaki person so no matter what there's like this equal power sharing that's happening on governance level so when we think about that framework right we're not just thinking about exhibits we're actually thinking about how we're operating on the governance level and so so one co-leader would be Wabanaki and the other could be non-Wabanaki another area that I'm really interested in and I think that's really at the heart of decolonizing work is around self-determination and around sovereignty so when I think about Amy Lone Tree's methodology I do see it as like a circle with the three sections collaboration privileging Indigenous voice and truth telling but in the heart of that I really think there's a lot around this power sharing and around self-determination and that means it's coming from from the nations themselves I also mentioned down here a little bit about reparative justice in the field of museum studies recent activities we can kind of see how a lot of people are activating reparative justice groups like decolonized this place are mobilizing to challenge established institutions like the Brooklyn Museum and the Whitney Museum and they're actually occupying these spaces in some cases and they're occupying these spaces in order to to call on really complex injustices that are occurring at these institutions and so understanding the disregard and exclusion of Indigenous histories and perspectives and in these acts they actually seek to become a potent catalyst for healing and in healing the institutional racism that has suppressed Indigenous cultures for centuries and so it's really interesting the ways in which decolonization is kind of popping up at various institutions and I'm always excited to see what's going to happen next but I want to thank everybody for coming and I'd be happy to take questions now and if you do wish to speak to me more afterwards I have my email available and thank you very, very much You were talking about to the archaeology I think you get the name the person who was taking body called Frans Boas Okay and and in use the phrase that they were taking this person was taking bodies after dark which doesn't that lead you to suspect that this person knew they were doing something in violation? Yes Absolutely and I've actually recently found other documented explorers from the Arctic and people that were also collecting explicitly writing that they had to do it under the cover of dark because communities did not want them doing that and if you want to continue to collect all these oral traditions and record them but you also want these bodies for study and to put into collections what are you going to do? You're going to do it by deception you're going to do it by the cover of night and in secret and so you're absolutely right though and that actually tells me that he knew that if they knew then they would be activating their own self-determination saying no you can't be here well you need to return those you know so but I'm glad you picked that out because as when I was writing that down I absolutely thought of that too he knew he knew but also nobody else in like his colleagues weren't necessarily calling him out for doing it right because he was writing about it I work in the field of conservation we've been thinking about how to be better collaborating collaborators with indigenous people and I one thing that is just a challenge is the idea of collaboration is so important and raising indigenous voices so important and yet capacity is limited to one opportunity something and therefore we want to make sure we're compensating well and we also want it's just it's just a challenge and I wonder if you've had that at the Avenue Museum too where you're asking for that collaboration but there's not always enough capacity to provide to provide it so how do you yeah we're constantly kind of confronting that too and it feels like oh we're working with the same people we're over and over again but you know they're the ones you work with and no we absolutely confront that and it's it's really hard when you know that you're working with people that are already collaborating with like you know 10 other museums or other institutions across the state or they're working on all all the projects within their community which should always be their priority and is quite frankly is their priority like their duties within their their own communities and we do but I do mention compensation because often people will think that you know oh you just want to work with me because you want us to do this right but you need to you need to compensate Indigenous people for their work they are compensated for their time and their travel when they come to Native advisory meetings like the in-person advisory meetings yes absolutely yeah the what? the big book of Artifact oh I think I know what you're talking about it was used at that one exhibit I'm not sure which one you were picking on it was like it was I was there at one point and they did a lecture series around it and they had brought in they were they had could choose out of this massive book and I didn't know if you knew the size of the book because I remember them telling me the size and it was just so amazing no I'm not I'm not familiar with that but take a look at this sorry it's okay I know that they are definitely working towards including more Indigenous artists in there especially around forgive me what's the show that they do annually with main artists yeah thank you the bi-annual and trying to include more Native artists and when thinking about like all the different types of museums art museums kind of have their own issues and complications that they as institutions that get to define what art is and what craft is and this idea of like what high art is or what's even Native art is it just any art that a Native person does or does it have to be traditional like there are a lot of things that you know the art world kind of has to to work around and and and consider because there's there's a lot of power in being able to name something as Indigenous art or saying it's not art right there's a incredible amounts of of power in that but I do know that they they're trying very hard to to include more Indigenous artists have you come across any literature on decolonizing state-run institutions okay state museums oh that's a good one I have not run all across literature around it no all right oh we do know them yes and and in just just this year they've really been starting to to think about the ways in in which what what is actually in their collections and in working with Wabanaki people and a lot of that comes down to being compliant with NAGPRA and but within the the spirit of the law right and so understanding that this is where Wabanaki people want want institutions to start right yeah we have to return to the ancestors first so with the Abbey Museum being being an affiliate of the Smithsonian is there any part of sort of the Smithsonian organization that provides support or extra amplification of voice around this work for the the Smithsonian at home yeah so we're part of the affiliates program which kind of means you know they they've reviewed our institution and the caliber of our exhibits and they they've said you know like this is an experience or a quality of experience that you would experience at you know one of their Smithsonian museums in in D.C. and so but it actually adds like a complexity around around the the I'm losing my words but around around what people think of it when they're coming from the outside and they see Smithsonian and and they think oh yeah you must be funded by the Smithsonian and you must get all this great you know kickbacks and and of course that's not the case right it's more of a promotional type of opportunity in which we get to do this work but there are other opportunities as far as working with other Smithsonian affiliates or or working with with the Smithsonian on specific types of projects and so you know I'm working on one right now around indigenous star stories and and indigenous cosmologies with the Smithsonian and so it does bring about some really interesting partnerships that can happen and I see that as like one of the greatest opportunities within that that particular program yes as a you know an average person that might go to one of these museums and what do you recommend for folks to be a more enlightened advocate or yeah I guess advocating for you know for this acknowledgement right and and you know I'm just curious what your thoughts are of around what we can be doing as a community to yeah to move this forward as an educator and just as a a museum goer I I always think that it's a really powerful to be able to ask questions so you know as you're going through just ask like all the questions that come to mind you can even ask them out loud sometimes that's really powerful like wow I wonder where they got that information from or you know I I wonder where they even like the idea for this exhibit came from you know and you kind of go through and then and you can actually respond to to the text on the walls itself and and to think about you know who's writing these I think really great cases for decolonizing approaches within even like label writing is people will attribute where this this information is coming from and so I think there's a lot of really interesting ways that we can be really critical engagers when we go into museums and then just to say you know I remember a couple years ago at the main historical society I remember going into the basket they had this really great display of Wabanaki basketry and somebody wrote like it was on like a feedback wall and somebody wrote I think we should be talking about colonization today and talking about these really important issues of the tribes today and then you see what's on display right now over there and it's really like that came to be right and so put your opinions out there in like museum people want to know what the audiences are interested in if you're interested in those stories of survival and continuity and indigenous peoples today then you should ask them for that I was just at that exhibit last week I really appreciated being able to be there I was trying to get to the here's a couple other questions happening on I was just thinking said I tried to make it seem I couldn't but regardless and so I was thinking within May in particular I was wondering if there's other examples that you've come across of effective decolonization happening within the state or just like or you know within New England generally obviously having museums working on themselves especially when we think about like that book that I had on about first thing and last things it's really kind of slow in New England because there has been just this idea of erasure around indigenous indigenous peoples and so it's a slow coming but it honestly across the field it's been very slow so it's not that that wild for me to think that it's still really slow in Maine but I see people when they engage with our exhibits or they hear about our processes they are interested and they want to learn more and it's just a matter of understanding that we don't necessarily have the roadmap for other institutions but we certainly have experiences that we want to share with other institutions and I I am really excited to see like the new collaboration that are happening or among other institutions in Maine and and I have hope for the future I definitely do I think people want to do better work and and understand that audiences are responding very very well to to this type of work and just the type of caliber of work that comes out of really collaborative and really powerful exhibits and and storytelling start this could you remind us a little bit about the Abbey Museum where it is and oh yes thank you sorry my boss is like oh you need to do that so the Abbey Museum is actually located in Bar Harbor, Maine so it's a little trek from here if you want to ever come visit us we do have two locations our our museum started again as an archaeological museum our original location is within Acadia National Park so if you think about the rise of Acadia National Park like the the the Abbey Museum actually was created in conjunction with Acadia National Park so there's some interesting entanglements within that but we are located inside in Acadia National Park but our primary location is actually in downtown Bar Harbor now and that's where we have all of our staff offices and our our collections and then seasonally we open our second location inside the park