Museum Rhetoric as Nation-Building

This paper examines analog records, ledger book pages and catalog cards, at the Smithsonian Institution (SI) National Museum of Natural History within the anthropology collections, examining how these documents advance an information infrastructure categorizing the Pacific Northwest materials making up accession 000051. Within this case study and textual analysis, I found that using a nation-building lens elucidated knowledge organization (KO) logics at play with these records. My critical reading outlines the ways these records firmly place Indigenous materials and belongings under SI and broader Euro-American knowledge systems via language use and place names, rhetorically furthering land dispossession and functioning to realize the US as a nation. This paper positions KO and associated rhetoric and language use as a tool of nation building, and museum records as a process, a genre of writing that have been honed, remade, and reinscribed over time within institutions toward political and national ends. I end this paper describing ongoing projects supporting and furthering Indigenous sovereignty via KO work in relation to cultural heritage collections, illustrating responses to the nation-building rhetoric within the SI records I analyze.