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Contribution short abstract:

Exploring museum objects made by Indigenous people, given their complex pathways from community to museum and the varying temporal contexts transitions occur in. This intersectional research team visits Îethka (Stoney Nakoda) belongings in museums to build relationships.

Contribution long abstract:

Over the last five years a group of Îethka (Stoney Nakoda) artists and storytellers, working with a museum professional and student researcher, have been responding to requests from their community to forge connections with living objects and knowledge stored in museums. Their work involves a process of visiting, with museums and their workers, with community members and Elders, with archival sources, with language, and with the belongings and living objects themselves. Through this process they have identified hundreds of “artifacts” in museums around the western world which originated in their communities of Mînîthnî, Gahna, and Kiska Waptan, in the baha (foothills) of what is today known as southern Alberta, Canada.

Museums typically exist for the good of the commons, but our challenges to find belongings in collections, in essence, to do research with them, shows some flaws in the idea of museums as ready sources of object-based knowledge. Many belongings we found have never been on exhibit, have limited provenance data, and are still in many ways, inaccessible to our research. This project explores some ways museums can improve relationships with Indigenous people for the benefit of all.