Plundered Skulls And Stolen Spirits

Download or read book Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits written by Chip Colwell and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-10-07 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A fascinating account of both the historical and current struggle of Native Americans to recover sacred objects that have been plundered and sold to museums. Museum curator and anthropologist Chip Colwell asks the all-important question: Who owns the past? Museums that care for the objects of history or the communities whose ancestors made them?"--Provided by the publisher

Download or read book Grave Injustice written by Kathleen Sue Fine-Dare and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grave Injustice is the powerful story of the ongoing struggle of Native Americans to repatriate the objects and remains of their ancestors that were appropriated, collected, manipulated, sold, and displayed by Europeans and Americans. Anthropologist Kathleen S. Fine-Dare focuses on the history and culture of both the impetus to collect and the movement to repatriate Native American remains. Using a straightforward historical framework and illuminating case studies, Fine-Dare first examines the changing cultural reasons for the appropriation of Native American remains. She then traces the succession of incidents, laws, and changing public and Native attitudes that have shaped the repatriation movement since the late nineteenth century. Her discussion and examples make clear that the issue is a complex one, that few clear-cut heroes or villains make up the history of the repatriation movement, and that little consensus about policy or solutions exists within or beyond academic and Native communities. The concluding chapters of this history take up the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which Fine-Dare considers as a legal and cultural document. This highly controversial federal law was the result of lobbying by American Indian and Native Hawaiian peoples to obtain federal support for the right to bring back to their communities the human remains and associated objects that are housed in federally funded institutions all over the United States. Grave Injustice is a balanced introduction to a longstanding and complicated problem that continues to mobilize and threatens to divide Native Americans and the scholars who work with and write about them.

Download or read book Decolonizing Museums written by Amy Lonetree and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Museum exhibitions focusing on Native American history have long been curator controlled. However, a shift is occurring, giving Indigenous people a larger role in determining exhibition content. In Decolonizing Museums, Amy Lonetree examines the co

Download or read book Spirited Encounters written by Karen Coody Cooper and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2008 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the twentieth century, American Indians across North America organized protests against traditional museum treatment of Native materials and the Native community. In response, museums began to change their methods. Spirited Encounters provides a foundation for understan...

Download or read book Prophets and Ghosts written by Samuel J. Redman and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A searching account of nineteenth-century salvage anthropology, an effort to preserve the culture of ÒvanishingÓ Indigenous peoples through dispossession of the very communities it was meant to protect. In the late nineteenth century, anthropologists, linguists, archaeologists, and other chroniclers began amassing Indigenous cultural objectsÑcrafts, clothing, images, song recordingsÑby the millions. Convinced that Indigenous peoples were doomed to disappear, collectors donated these objects to museums and universities that would preserve and exhibit them. Samuel Redman dives into the archive to understand what the collectors deemed the tradition of the Òvanishing IndianÓ and what we can learn from the complex legacy of salvage anthropology. The salvage catalog betrays a vision of Native cultures clouded by racist assumptionsÑa vision that had lasting consequences. The collecting practice became an engine of the American museum and significantly shaped public education and preservation, as well as popular ideas about Indigenous cultures. Prophets and Ghosts teases out the moral challenges inherent in the salvage project. Preservationists successfully maintained an important human inheritance, sometimes through collaboration with Indigenous people, but collectorsÕ methods also included outright theft. The resulting portrait of Indigenous culture reinforced the publicÕs confidence in the hierarchies of superiority and inferiority invented by ÒscientificÓ racism. Today the same salvaged objects are sources of invaluable knowledge for researchers and museum visitors. But the question of what should be done with such collections is nonetheless urgent. Redman interviews Indigenous artists and curators, who offer fresh perspectives on the history and impact of cultural salvage, pointing to new ideas on how we might contend with a challenging inheritance.

Download or read book Accomplishing NAGPRA written by Sangita Chari and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "More than one million cultural items - and the remains of nearly forty thousand Native Americans - have been repatriated since the 1990 passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. The act, which addresses long-standing claims by federally recognized tribes, requires museums and federal agencies to return requested Native American cultural items to lineal descendants, culturally affiliated Indian tribes, and Native Hawai'an organizations. Drawing on case studies, personal reflections, historical documents, and statistics, Accomplishing NAGPRA reveals the day-to-day reality of implementing the act. The volume examines the grassroots, practical application of NAGPRA throughout the United States, reflecting the viewpoints of tribes, museums, federal agencies, attorneys, academics, and others invested in the landmark act"--Unedited summary from book cover.

Download or read book The Whole Picture written by Alice Procter and published by Cassell. This book was released on 2020-03-19 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Probing, jargon-free and written with the pace of a detective story... [Procter] dissects western museum culture with such forensic fury that it might be difficult for the reader ever to view those institutions in the same way again. " Financial Times 'A smart, accessible and brilliantly structured work that encourages readers to go beyond the grand architecture of cultural institutions and see the problematic colonial histories behind them.' - Sumaya Kassim Should museums be made to give back their marbles? Is it even possible to 'decolonize' our galleries? Must Rhodes fall? How to deal with the colonial history of art in museums and monuments in the public realm is a thorny issue that we are only just beginning to address. Alice Procter, creator of the Uncomfortable Art Tours, provides a manual for deconstructing everything you thought you knew about art history and tells the stories that have been left out of the canon. The book is divided into four chronological sections, named after four different kinds of art space: The Palace, The Classroom, The Memorial and The Playground. Each section tackles the fascinating, enlightening and often shocking stories of a selection of art pieces, including the propaganda painting the East India Company used to justify its rule in India; the tattooed Maori skulls collected as 'art objects' by Europeans; and works by contemporary artists who are taking on colonial history in their work and activism today. The Whole Picture is a much-needed provocation to look more critically at the accepted narratives about art, and rethink and disrupt the way we interact with the museums and galleries that display it.