Ethnic Museums: Shifting Colonial Paradigms Toward Indigenized Alternatives

The purpose of this article is to share common Indigenization challenges sampled from emergent O'odham museum experiences in southern Arizona.We discuss what these experiences may mean for the development of new protocols for Native museums in general and the relationship of evolving paradigms with conventional museum practices in particular.The article provides an update on the development of professional practices from the "shop floors" of southern Arizona's O'odham museums.We intend to bring awareness to what an originally Euro-centric museum idea set out to do and where Indigenous innovation is capable of making it go.The "database" resource for this paper is the authors' experience working in two (out of four) O'odham community museums, which we document with the aim of contributing to the formation of locally situated, stable