The Indigenous Turn in Museums

This is the second in a series of Q&A installments intended to bring public history more deliberately into Modern American History. In a Q&A session published in the July 2023 issue of MAH, Teasel Muir-Harmony and Sarah B. Snyder asked five historians to reflect on the opportunities and challenges raised through their work with the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. In this session, historians Amanda Cobb-Greetham (MAH Executive Board member and faculty at the University of North Carolina) and Scott Manning Stevens (Syracuse University) offer their thoughts on the current state of Indigenous studies and Native American public history and art and ask three esteemed curators to reflect on their own work in this dynamic field. Here Kathleen Ash-Milby (Portland Art Museum), Jordan Poorman Cocker (Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art), and Patricia Marroquin Norby (Metropolitan Museum of Art) discuss their curatorial visions and institutional settings, their goals for reaching wider publics through the production and display of Indigenous arts, and the extent to which an “Indigenous turn” has transpired in American popular as well as academic culture, challenges and all.