Can Museums Promote Community Healing? A Healing Museum Model for Indigenous Communities

Abstract

Since colonization, Indigenous peoples and various ethnic groups have endured exploitation, marginalization, and extreme oppression, often culminating in physical and cultural genocide. Crimes of cultural destruction disrupt the fabric of communities; they create a loss of control, sever ties with the past and future, and create feelings of a loss of identity and connection with the value and meaning of culture. This dismissive and destructive behavior by and attitudes of western society towards Indigenous peoples is also reflected in the history of museums. Traditional western museums have misrepresented, objectified, and acted as the authority over Indigenous culture, and so the relationship between museums and Indigenous peoples has historically been one of tension, mistrust, and conflict. However this is changing as museums evolve into agents of social change. Indigenous communities are creating museums and cultural centers to promote cultural connectedness and reaffirm cultural identity, especially after genocide. This thesis will explore how Indigenous communities the importance of healing and oral traditions within Indigenous communities and how these elements can be incorporated into a museum or cultural centers to acknowledge these acts of cultural destruction and to heal the community. I propose that museums are evolving beyond agents of social change so that Indigenous communities can utilize these institutions to acknowledge acts of cultural destruction committed against the people as means of healing. This new museum model incorporates the critical elements of oral traditions and storytelling.