So I recently took a trip the the New York City Museum of Natural History. It was a really cool museum with exhibits showing dinosaurs, prehistoric animals, modern day animals, geology and space, etc. Many of the exhibits were beautifully created dioramas showing stuffed/replica animals in their natural habitats.
While there, went through a wing of the museum which covers the Great Plains/Eastern Woodlands Indians of North America. Picture Picture. Walking through there, something about it made me a little bit uncomfortable and I couldn't quite put my finger what it was. When I got home, I came across this article which argues that Native American art and artifacts don't belong in the Natural History Museum. I think this hits the nail on the head of what made me uncomfortable with the exhibit:
The TL:DR of the article is that Native American art and artifacts are no more a part of the "natural" world than a painting by Picasso or an iPhone. These are things created by people who were no less human than western peoples. Many of them still exist today and still practice the cultures that are on display in these museums. They aren't ancient pre-civilization cave men, and putting them in a museum alongside dinosaurs and modern mammals implies that Native American people are somehow part of the natural world, rather than part of human civilization. It dehumanizes them and teaches people to look at them as something lesser than modern people.
If you're interested in the subject, I'd recommend reading the above article because it makes the argument better than I can.
There are a lot of other ways this could be handled, and indeed there are Native American art and culture museums which display their cultures in a much more respectful way. I don't want to get into the options for how we could better educate people about Native American culture and civilization, and the conquest/destruction of their peoples by European settlers - I think that's another discussion entirely. My main point is that this is not a great way to present Native Americans to people, and should be phased out/presented in a different way.
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Submitted May 31, 2018 at 07:27PM by geoman2k https://ift.tt/2J0GmDp
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