Paper short abstract:

This paper explores an ethnographer’s encounter with two collections from her Sierra Tarahumara fieldsite: a contemporary collection in Ottawa’s Canadian Museum of History and a historical one in New York’s American Museum of Natural History that had been acquired a century earlier.

Paper long abstract:

After having lived with a Tarahumara (Rarámuri) community in the Sierra Tarahumara Mountains of northwestern Mexico, I was astonished to discover how moving it felt to be surrounded by a roomful of Tarahumara "artifacts" at the former Canadian Museum of Civilization. And a few years later when I did some archival research at the American Museum of Natural History into an earlier fieldworker who had visited the Sierra 100 years before me, things he had collected from "my" sierra community turned out to be holding in store another valuable lesson. This paper will describe and discuss these two scenes in which supposedly dusty and inert indigenous museum collections impressed upon me their enduring strengths.