Transcript
Jennifer Berglund 00:04
Welcome to HMSC Connects!, where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. My name is Jennifer Berglund, part of the Exhibits Team here at the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture, and I’ll be your host.
Jennifer Berglund 00:34
Today, I’m speaking with Stephanie Mach, the curator of North American Collections at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. She focuses on the museum’s historical, modern, and contemporary Native American collections. Stephanie is also a member of the Navajo Nation and the first Native curator for the North American Collections. I wanted to ask her about how she sees her role, not just as an academic, but as a person of Navajo descent, especially in a time when museum collections are reckoning with a difficult past. Here she is. Stephanie Mach, welcome to the show.
Stephanie Mach 01:17
Thank you, happy to be here.
Jennifer Berglund 01:25
You are a citizen of the Navajo Nation, though you grew up far from it in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and then St. Louis, Missouri, so you felt somewhat disconnected from those roots. Fast forward to college at Boston University where you studied Archaeology, which is something you always wanted to do as a kid. What drew you to that field and what was the connection between your interest in it, and your own personal and cultural history?
Stephanie Mach 01:55
I am Diné woman. I’m a citizen of the Navajo Nation. My mother is from the reservation, my dad’s from Upstate New York, and I grew up in North Carolina and Missouri, and kind of a whole bunch of other places. We moved around a bit. So you’re right, my family did live far from both sides of my family so there was some distance between us. I do have fond memories of when my aunties or my grandma would come stay with us for an entire summer, sort of thing. I’ve also pen pals was one of my cousins.
We lived in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Wake Forest University is there. It’s actually where my father worked, and there’s an anthropology museum there and we did a field trip to the anthropology museum. You know, it wasn’t very large. It was kind of small, but I feel like I’m walking through it right now, like, that’s how well I remember this tiny museum. It wasn’t terrible, but it was quiet, and it was empty. You know, I remember the presence of Indigenous people wasn’t there, though all of our things were, just that feeling of the people being separated from their cultural items. So there’s like a sadness to that, in addition to growing up in a very small, sort of segregated town and being the only Native person. The other feeling that you get, or at least I got visiting those museums and being really far from where my family is from, my community, is this sense of being surrounded by things from your community. And that’s kind of one of the beautiful things about museums is you feel these cultural items are parts of our community that are really far from home, and you can go visit them, and you can be surrounded by parts of your community and learn from them. You can learn directly from, you know, those cultural objects that are on display. I feel many ways about museums, but those experiences as a kid were definitely formative, though I don’t think that’s why I wound up in the museum field. I think that’s a much longer story.
Jennifer Berglund 03:55
Which began with archaeology. How did you go from archaeology to museum practitioner?
Stephanie Mach 04:03
That’s a great question. I don’t know because when you apply to college and go to college, you usually don’t declare until maybe your sophomore year. I applied to an archeology program. At the time, the only archaeology program in the entire United States was at Boston University. I guess somehow I knew that that’s what I wanted to do, and I think, partly that is this desire for reconnection, this feeling that I always lived far from home and I wanted that connection, and archaeology, which is a very place-based, site-based, land-based sort of research, I thought that could be a way for me to spend time back home and learn more about my culture and – really – the history. The program I was in didn’t have any North American archaeologists, so that didn’t quite work out for me, but that is definitely where it began. And then I did a couple of field schools and learned very quickly that field archaeology was not for me. Again, that same feeling of being the only Native person excavating on these large teams, being the only Native person or maybe one of two, and, you know, feeling a certain way about “Why are we taking up these things”? you know, “What is the relationship to the descendants? Are they involved with the research in any way?” I just wasn’t sure if it was quite the field for me, and there are many amazing collaborative archaeologies, many deep collaborations in Indigenous archaeology, but for many reasons was not the field for me, but I kept asking those questions, of you know, “Why are we doing this? What is the implication of unearthing this material? Where does it end up? How do we interpret it?” And all of those questions for me were answered in this one space, you know, the space of a museum. This is where those things end up. This is where they are interpreted for the public or Indigenous people get to tell their own story. And I became, I think, more drawn to the legacies of archaeology and the legacies of anthropological research, and what we can do about them today, ensuring that Indigenous communities are reconnected with those material items and the knowledge that goes along with it that exists in these museum spaces, whether that’s on display or in storage rooms. So that’s when I became immediately invested in museums. I just knew it – that that was the place for me.
Jennifer Berglund 06:32
Can you tell me specifically about the pieces of this complicated legacy of archaeology, and how you and your field are facing that now in a way that’s different than museums have in the past?
Stephanie Mach 06:51
A lot of archaeological excavations in the past did not seek any direct input from the Native people who are descendants of those that live at those, what are today called, archaeological sites. So that means that sites that perhaps are viewed as sacred sites or viewed as places that shouldn’t be disturbed for spiritual or cultural reasons were then being, you know, violated in all of these different ways by archaeologists, and oftentimes looters, and those materials will then eventually end up in museums – things like burials being desecrated ancestors being removed — the funerary items, or burial items that were buried with those ancestors also being removed, oftentimes distributed across multiple museums. So all of this sort of violent way of extraction was done without the knowledge or consent of the Indigenous communities that are related to those individuals and those places. Today, the museums are living with that legacy of all of these ancestral remains and funerary belongings, and many other items. Ethnographers, anthropologists who are going out into communities were doing so in a time that was very difficult for many of our Native communities. We are being forcibly relocated away from our ancestral lands, people are starving, our foodways and food is being taken from us, and we’re being pushed onto reservations. There’s active assimilation policies, forcibly removing our culture and language from us. So in these tough moments and times, then you have this person coming into your community as an anthropologist, recording things like language and histories and knowledge, which honestly, and often we’re very grateful for it today, you know, that we have that access to that material in archives. But at the time, it was all possible because of this moment in which exploitation was commonplace, and it was really opportunistic. The United States is a settler colonial nation. We are still a colonial nation and anthropology was very much hand in hand with that process, and those material items, those Indigenous knowledges wound up in museums. So that’s when we say we’re living with this colonial legacy or living with this colonial history. That’s what we mean in museums is that we worked side by side with colonial policies and colonial violence, and really benefited from that through the taking of these cultural items and ancestors and Indigenous knowledge that now exists in museums and archives.
Jennifer Berglund 9:48
What did you study in grad school, and how did your interest evolve during grad school specifically to become interested in this aspect of anthropology archaeology?
Stephanie Mach 10:00
Without even knowing much about museums, never having interned or worked in museums, just kind of having casually gone to them, I decided to enroll in a Museum Studies Master’s Program at New York University. I have a degree in Museum Studies, and there you learn kind of the practical aspects of museums: How do museums get funded? What does a registrar do? What are the laws and requirements of behind-the-scenes stuff that we don’t often talk about publicly in museums, or are kind of a mystery, because everybody always just thinks there’s a curator and all the other stuff just magically happens? There was a theoretical component, so thinking about how museums are the way they are today because of this whole history. Going back to the Enlightenment period, and the whole first concept of anything that looked like a museum through this – what we call the “salvage ethnography moment” in which many of the collections in the United States were built. That coincided with Native American assimilation from roughly 1880 to 1930. Massive collections are being formed and in museums around major cities in the United States, and thinking through how have people written about it? How have people thought about this? What is that shift in what a museum is, and should be and who is it for? I was really excited to be part of those conversations. After I got the Master’s in museum studies, I was looking for jobs, and I didn’t find anything in New York. And you know, honestly, it was one of those situations where New York City like chewed me up and spit me out, so I landed in Philadelphia. And I was really excited, it was exactly what I wanted, a job in collections, specifically thinking about access to collections at a university museum with this really difficult, long history embedded in colonialism, this amazing North American collection, and that’s at the University of Pennsylvania, the Penn Museum. And I was there for 10 years, and I learned so much about museums, and how they operate, and the challenges of doing this decolonial or indigenizing sort of work in museums, really just thinking through how museums change. How do we get that momentum going? How do we have these conversations? I had finally gotten a job in museums, then I learned that when you work in a museum, sometimes you just have to get stuff done. Sometimes you are just doing your job and trying to make it from day to day, and those bigger conversations that you want to have, there’s very little time for if the museum doesn’t make it a priority. And it needs to be a priority. We need to make time and space for this, and hold conversations and bring in specialists and advisors and that sort of thing. My experience was more personal. Let’s see if I can give you an example. I was a very shy individual. I was shy my entire childhood. I was shy through grad school. I was shy when I started my first job, and all of that changed when I started to see things that other people weren’t speaking up about, or maybe they weren’t noticing. Things like the way that ancestors were being handled or treated or even talked about, just calling an ancestor a specimen doesn’t feel great, or celebrating archaeology. It’s not something you can’t celebrate, but it’s what and how, and if you ignore that element of the sort of colonial violence of the history of archaeology, you really end up accidentally, or maybe intentionally, celebrating that or ignoring the more difficult aspects of those histories. And I found myself not being very quiet anymore because nobody else was saying anything, and that was a real shift for me. And that shift was something that, like I said, felt personal, but it also felt like this huge responsibility and weight, and not that any one Native person can speak for all Native people. But I knew that it would not feel good for people walking into our museum and seeing a lot of skulls in a hallway or an elevator lobby, and for really any colonized people whose ancestors have been removed in very violent ways, being surprised by their presence or being surprised by that history is not something that we need. It does more spiritual harm to individuals. The language, we talked about the term “specimen,” or even celebratory language about colonial archaeology, the sort of swashbuckling excitement that we get with Indiana Jones. At their core, they’re very racist histories that become celebrated, and so I think we need to be very careful about how we talk about those things, and how emotionally it impacts people but also, on a deeper level, spiritually has impacts for communities, especially my concern being Indigenous communities.
Jennifer Berglund 15:22
After you graduated from BU in 2009, you actually had a collections internship at the Peabody, and this is where you were first exposed to collections care that was not strictly focused on materials preservation, but spiritual care and Native consultation. How did your early experience at the Peabody after graduating BU, how did it color your early understanding of the work of museums?
Stephanie Mach 15.51
I interned at the Peabody Museum in 2009, in the Collections Department. I worked with people that I get to work with again, today. They’re still there. And I had a great experience, honestly. If there’s any Native students listening at Harvard, I think they’d be very surprised by that, and just Native people in general. The Peabody has a terrible reputation. That’s a fact. We have a terrible reputation across Indian country, and in many cases, that is definitely earned. I mean, we’ve done things that are really unacceptable recently, on top of having that difficult legacy that we’ve been talking about, which is not something that we can change. We can only change what we do going forward. But in 2009, when I was very new to the field, very wide-eyed, what I appreciated was that I wasn’t the only Native student in the intern program. They very intentionally ensured that there was sort of a Native cohort, and maybe I haven’t talked about this yet but it’s extremely difficult to be in these sorts of spaces as the only Native person. You need people to lean on and talk to and support each other, and they ensured that. And I didn’t even know that I needed that until I was here, so I’m grateful that they thought of that. At that moment, they were using the term “stewardship.” They would say we are not the owners of this, maybe technically, legally, yes, but the acknowledgment that they are not the experts on the care of these cultural items, and that’s the real shift that’s happened in museums is that museums, many of them are acknowledging that interpretation, you know, exhibitions, who is telling the stories needs to involve the people that the stories are about, and who’s caring for the cultural objects in storage needs to involve the people whose ancestors made them. And that was certainly something that was happening on both fronts. They were thinking through how to make exhibitions with Native partners, and they were thinking through collections care, sometimes it’s called consultation or collaboration. That can range a number of ways but essentially asking people, “How do you want this cared for? We will do our best with what’s possible in this setting.” And that’s really important. I didn’t have a perfect experience. I definitely have some difficult memories, but they were trying and that’s what was important to me. So I always sort of fondly looked back on that. When I went into other museums, you know, even just visiting, I did a lot of research for my graduate program. We visited a lot of museums, and I’ve interned in other museums, so I kind of always had in the back of my mind, you know, a little comparison to the Peabody in the way that they talked about care of collections and the way that they hoped for being able to do better. I mean, it was very present, even then, in a way that I have not felt visiting or working in other museums.
Jennifer Berglund 18:59
As you said, you’ve visited and worked in a lot of museums over the course of your career, and as you were saying, some are doing a better job than others of stewarding their collections. How have you seen museums do this well?
Stephanie Mach 19:13
I’ve seen amazing exhibitions or topics that have been tackled in these Native-led spaces that I know we could not translate into the Peabody simply because of our history. A lot of Native museums aren’t just Native museums, they’re sort of cultural centers. The audience, of course, is their own community, but they’re also teaching out to the world and visitors about their tribal culture and history, and people. I mean, that’s also true for a museum like the Peabody. We’re a university museum so, of course, we have to think about a university, educational context. We also have to think about the Greater Boston public because we are the only museum in this whole region that focuses on the topic of Native America that sort of tackles sharing that history and culture, and for even a K-12 audience where it’s really needed, in addition to the general or adult public, we have to think about the communities that are connected to the collections in the Peabody. So we have all of these different constituents to think about. Some things that I have really appreciated when I’ve gone into museums’ storage rooms are, and you have to have a lot of space to do this, which is one of our biggest challenges. But I’ve really appreciated the ability to separate out funerary items, sacred items, ceremonial items – anything that you shouldn’t accidentally come across in storage. When we’re having native visitors, it can be very not just jarring and shocking, but like we said, have spiritual ramifications if you see or come across or touch or that unwanted engagement was something that somebody should not or don’t want to see that I have really appreciated going into other museums when they’re completely separated out. And again, that requires a lot of communication and consultation with the community saying, “Okay, this is something that we don’t want our community members to see, can you please move it?” You mentioned earlier, you know, just the general care of, you know, maybe this should be facing east or this should be higher than that, or this should be covered, or this should be able to breathe so don’t put it in plastic. That’s something that a lot of museums do, including the Peabody, which is great, but having the extra space to actually physically make storage rooms more accessible by reducing that chance of accidentally coming across something sacred or ceremonial, that’s a really great model. The National Museum of the American Indian – they have an off-site storage location and at that storage facility, which they call, you know, their Cultural Resource Center, I believe. It’s not storage, right? It’s a cultural resource center. So even thinking about that, the language shift that we’ve talked about earlier with, you know, specimen to ancestor. I mean, here it’s not storage, it’s a cultural resource center. It’s a place that we can go and have access to our cultural heritage. So something as simple as changing the name. They have this amazing facility, and within it, they really thought about what spaces do people need when they are coming to visit. Maybe people need to smudge, maybe people need to pray. Whatever they need to do to spiritually either protect themselves or prepare themselves to be in that storage space, to being around whatever might be in those rooms, and also emotionally and otherwise prepare for visiting with their cultural items made by ancestors. They have created a really beautiful space in their storage facility that allows for all of that sort of thing. It’s got exhaust for smudging, and you know, just something as simple as that. We don’t even have that at the Peabody. We have one room where we can open the windows, you know. That’s our equivalent. It’s not enough. It’s not adequate, but it’s what we’ve got and we are working with it, and we’re working around this colonial structure that we exist in the best that we can.
Jennifer Berglund 23:16
As a Native person that is a curator at the Peabody Museum, you have entered your role during a time of reckoning, both for the Peabody and as you were referring to earlier, for anthropology/archaeology museums as a whole. And, you know, this is really heavy stuff, particularly for you as a Navajo woman. How do you handle this work emotionally?
Stephanie Mach 23:47
How do I handle this work emotionally? This goes back to not being alone. In the workplace, these are emotionally draining topics to talk about every day. And yes, we’re energized because we want to make these changes and we want to have these conversations, but they can also be incredibly sad, and personal. They can be and feel really personal to our communities if we’re talking about the Southwest, or if we’re specifically talking about Navajo cultural heritage. If we are talking about maybe a friend or another person’s community, it’s not theoretical. These are our lives, our communities, our families who are experiencing this pain, and this generational trauma that we also experience and then we’re like living in it and working in it. So it’s tough, and it’s heavy, and I will say you have to be good about advocating for yourself and what you need, which I’ve not always been in the past. But I really appreciate at the Peabody and at Harvard, there’s a strong Native community on campus, and we kind of all support each other, and I think that’s really beautiful. And it’s necessary when you’re in a place like Harvard, and it’s absolutely necessary when we are working in the Peabody, or with the Peabody. And especially that I’m not the only Native person on staff at the Peabody, that has made the biggest difference, in my experience working in museums. As Native people, we aren’t just individuals. We come from communities, families. We come from nations. Though we are not representatives, you know, I’m not a representative of the Navajo Nation, I have that responsibility to my family, my community, and then when you kind of extend that, there’s a relational responsibility that exists now as like extended relatives. Like we’ve all experienced this genocide, we’ve all experienced this violence of colonialism, and we are all trying to heal from that. And so in that way, we are related, and so that responsibility kind of extends out from yourself to this kind of larger Indigenous community, and that’s a lot for one person in one museum to sort of carry without a support system. And so it’s been incredibly important for me as a Native museum professional to work with other Native museum professionals to also learn from them. But you know, quite honestly, to just talk and like, “Oh my gosh, that was heavy. How do you feel? Do you want to, like, go out for a walk?” Honestly, I’ve been supported in that too, you know. After some very difficult days, my supervisor and our leadership, they know that these are heavy topics. They know that they’re difficult, and they’ll say, “Wow, that was deep. Do you need to process this? Whatever you need to do, please go do that.” And I’ve never had anyone say something like that to me, just to acknowledge the emotional labor of at all. You have to have a support system, and I do feel like I have that here at Harvard, and I hope that other Native staff at the Peabody and Native people across Harvard also feel that, that we’re all here to support each other. And allies, like I said, just the awareness of what we might be going through in certain conversations, or on uncertain days, that might be difficult, not even related to what’s going on at the Peabody, but related to political or other things happening out in Indian country.
Jennifer Berglund 27.10
You’ve been in your position for about a year now, and it’s been a really intense year. You had your hands full, both in terms of just work and also spiritually, emotionally, all of those things. Can you tell me about some of the projects you’ve worked on and just talk about your experience a little bit?
Stephanie Mach 27.29
It’s been a year and a half. When I started, we really hit the ground running. Museums have a huge issue of lacking transparency. A lot of communities feel like they don’t know what’s in these institutions. What ancestors are there that you might not be telling us about? What sacred or significant objects might be there that we haven’t found out about yet? And yes, there’s this whole process through NAGPRA, the repatriation law, whereby museums communicate that out to tribes. But in general, there’s this feeling that museums are not being transparent. I have heard that Native communities don’t think that the Peabody is being transparent, so I think that that’s a huge issue and one of the things that I was most excited about when you start working a new job is like, “Okay, let me go on the database and see what there actually is.” So I was excited to look at the database, and so I’m looking through these things and I come across rows and rows of records of hair clippings. The Woodbury Collection is what we call the collection of hair clippings. And it said, “Woodbury Collection” and it said the context was boarding schools, and immediately that kind of, “oh no” feeling sets in, and that shock of the boarding school context. The hair clippings were collected in the 1930s by a Physical Anthropologist hoping to do, you know, comparative studies of hair of Indigenous people in different Native communities in the United States, but also comparing to Indigenous relations in Asia, theories about the people of the Americas but they wound up in the Peabody’s collection. You know, they were donated, I think in the, you know, the mid-1930s, and there’s approximately around 1400 of these hair clippings. Around half of them are from contexts of boarding schools, and going back to what we were talking about, you know, earlier, this sort of extremely difficult era, which honestly extends into the present, this sort of assimilationist notion of removing culture. You know, Americanizing people, that was happening to our Native communities through this assimilation policy. The boarding schools were that mechanism to remove children from their families, from their communities, and really sever that generational knowledge transfer. Children weren’t allowed to speak their own language or practice their own religion, and physically, their clothes, their identity was taken from them, and their hair was cut right when they arrived. This does not seem to be that exact scenario. It kind of looks like maybe a set of children were selected for a quick clipping. We don’t know. It’s not a large amount of hair. It’s not an entire braid. People ask that question a lot, because the first thing that we think is that we know our children’s hair was cut right when they arrived. That was something that was taken from them because that is part of our identity, that’s part of our spirit. That’s a very powerful part of who we are, and that was one of the first things taken from us. So then to know these hair clippings were taken from individuals in boarding school contexts, many of them children, and then put in these little envelopes and wound up in a museum far, far away, is like just yet another violence that becomes really unfathomable. And when we say we’re living with these legacies at the Peabody, this is yet another one, and this one was really shocking. You know, I had worked in the museum field for more than a decade, and you’d think I wouldn’t be shocked by anything, but it’s the hair. It’s the boarding school. These are people that we know. This is not generations and generations ago, this is people’s grandmothers, this is people’s great aunts, this is people’s great uncles, this is really, really close, and that immediate pain.
Jennifer Berglund 31:12
You and I were talking before, and you were saying every Native person in the US has a story about boarding schools. It’s not something that just happened to a few people. It’s connected to everyone in some ways.
Stephanie Mach 31:27
Yes, that’s right. Yeah, especially I think around the 1930s, we know that somewhere around more than 70% of Native children were in boarding school. So this impacts basically every Native family in the United States. I remember my grandmother. I asked her about her experience. I felt really bad about doing that because she clearly was not that comfortable talking about that history, but I was just learning about boarding schools and she told me a little bit about her experience. The set of hair clippings is a massive project that we have been working on for the last year. They are being returned through NAGPRA, so the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, that’s a repatriation process. We’ve communicated with hundreds of tribes, tried to reach every single tribal nation that has members of their community represented in this collection, and we have already completed several repatriations back to either lineal descendants or tribal nations. That’s one big project that will be ongoing for, I think, a long time and we hope to be as transparent as possible about what’s going on with the hair clippings and the repatriation process, so one of the things that we’ve done is created a website where we share as much as possible about the hair clippings in the Woodbury Collection. And we’ve also recently worked on our repatriation web pages so that the language is sort of easier to follow and the processes easier to follow about how to get in contact for repatriations either through NAGPRA or beyond because now that Peabody is doing repatriations beyond NAGPRA, as well.
Jennifer Berglund 33:07
Working on projects like this now having been in your job for a year and a half, do you see your role differently now? Do you see your approach to your role differently now?
Stephanie Mach 33:19
This is what I thought the role would look like, and this is what I want the role to be. The emphasis on addressing these sensitive collections, these collections that carry a lot of historical trauma with them being a priority. What they were envisioning for this position was somebody who wanted to work with all and any tribal nation and Indigenous community to address some of the sensitive collections at the Peabody. I mean, the Woodbury was a surprise, but there are other collections that we also know need attention and reconnection. This emphasis on reconnection with communities was very clear, but it represents that shift from this concept of a curator as an expert, or the expert, right, on somebody else’s culture to an understanding of a curator as somebody who grows relationships between the museum and communities, which acknowledges that the museum is not the expert, the curators are not the expert on culture. But communities themselves are the experts on their own histories, their own cultures, can tell their own stories, and museums are a tool that can help them do so, and we have expertise in other ways that we can work together to tell these stories to create exhibitions, and that we are also not the experts on how to care for these cultural items. Museums have very specific professions, like collections managers, and conservators, and people who are trained to know the sort of best practices of care from a more scientific standpoint of what is the impact of light damage, or what sort of temperature range might be best for this or that type of material. But then we can combine that with cultural knowledge and understanding about how to best care for these items, and that the museum’s understanding or the museum’s practice around care does not trump that of the communities. That, again, we are not the experts in how to care. We have an expertise, but we are not the experts in how to care for items. Communities know the best way to care for their cultural items. It really spoke to the impact that I wanted to have, and that I felt that I even needed for my own healing was helping other people have access to the collections to help them feel like these aren’t spaces that hide our cultural items from us that they are transparent and open and welcoming. I mean, it’s difficult when you’re a place like Harvard or the Peabody. It’s kind of a cool brick building, but it also has the colonial character. It’s steeped in that, so you really can’t get away from that. So like, how do you make something like that welcoming to people? How do you ensure that they have the tools or the space or the time when they’re visiting to care for them themselves, making the Peabody more welcoming for Indigenous visitors, more attendant to their needs? We have all of these positions in the museum that think about the physical care of the collections. How many conservators do we have? How many collections managers do we have? How many curators do we have thinking about the collections? The question is, how many people do we have that think about caring for people? You know, this is a space that we also have to care for people in because like we said, these are emotional, and draining, and difficult, and beautiful. They’re also really beautiful moments. It’s like a family reunion. And what do you need for a family reunion? You need food. You need water. You need a table to gather around – to eat together.
Jennifer Berglund 37.03
The Peabody Museum does not have a good reputation when it comes to NAGPRA, the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act. How does that impact you and your work?
Stephanie Mach 37:15
This is a tough one because we, in our history of working on NAGPRA, so the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, we have done many repatriations to tribal nations and through that process, have made a lot of fantastic relationships and collaborative projects have started out of that. I don’t want to color our entire history of NAGPRA work, but there have been missteps in recent years and those missteps have really been hurtful to the communities that they impacted. That’s something that I know that we have addressed in more recent years, and I’m sure others have talked about this on the podcast, but with NAGPRA Advisory Committee, which advises the Director with the Faculty Advisory Committee, again, advises the Director, Jane Pickering. I think we’ve set up more systems to ensure sort of accountability and maybe more inclusion in the leadership structure in how decisions are made around things that impact tribal nations and impact Indigenous people across the world, but specifically when we’re thinking about NAGPRA, in the United States, and this does have impacts on our relationships with tribes. As a curator, thinking about the interpretation of the collections and knowing that I need to work with tribal nations to tell their stories with them, that’s a very collaborative process and requires a really close relationship. So how do I, as a curator, approach a community or a tribal nation and say, “Hey, I’d love to work with you on telling your story,” while knowing that in our storage rooms, maybe they’re still ancestors or sacred or sensitive items, or items that go beyond NAGPRA, that haven’t been addressed? How do I do that in good conscience knowing that there are maybe things that need to go home? Perhaps the priority is not an exhibition, but that relationship building needs to start with “What do you need first, in order to build a relationship with us?” Not, “We want to tell this story. Let’s focus on that.” But devoting resources – and time – and staff – to meeting the needs of tribal nations. When they say, “We don’t feel like you’re being transparent.” Okay, “How can we be more transparent?” “We need more access to our collections.” Okay, how do we do that? I would love to set up some sort of program where we have funds that can be allocated for tribal visits, or artists, you know, artists in residents, you know, something like that. We don’t have programs like that. We’re actually a very small staff. I don’t think a lot of people realize that, because the Peabody really looms large in the history of anthropology and the collections are so massive. The staff is really small, and as much as I would love to have a program like that, and have a magic endowment where I get to manage these funds and allocate these resources to bring travel visitors here. But we need to begin with, “What do you need first?” before we ask for anything, and if that’s ancestors need to go home, or we need to talk about how you’re caring for our cultural items in your museum, showing that we’re really open to that. We need to be able to show that the Peabody is flexible. Often when we have tribal visitors come, I don’t know if they think that they can ask us things, because there’s a perception that the Peabody will say no, and we have to change that. Because I have learned that I think we are very open to change. I think we’ve shown in the past four years with our new leadership, new policies, new advisory committees, so much has changed in the past four years that we need to now show the communities that we’re working with that we are flexible, that we are open to change, that we are not just willing to listen, but we want to listen. We want to hear what you need and what we can do to be better stewards. That perception is a huge thing that we have to overcome, and we can only do that with the work going forward with building those relationships and showing that we are more ethical stewards. That’s the language that we use at the Peabody, that we are being better stewards.
Jennifer Berglund 41:40
Stephanie Mach, thank you so much for being here. This has been really wonderful and enlightening.
Stephanie Mach 41:46
Thank you for having me. I really enjoyed it.
Jennifer Berglund 41:50
Today’s HMSC Connects! Podcast was edited by Eden Piacitelli and produced by me, Jennifer Berglund, and the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture. Special thanks to the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and to Stephanie Mach for her wisdom and expertise. And thank you so much for listening. If you like today’s podcast, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podbean, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you in a few weeks.