This program will be held in-person at the Newberry and livestreamed on Zoom. The online version of this event will be live captioned. Please register below.
In 2018, the Field Museum embarked on a four-year renovation of its Native North American Hall. Alaka Wali and Tom Skerwski led the partnership with the Native American community which, culminated in the new permanent exhibition, Native Truths: Our Voices, Our Stories. The speakers will examine the collaborative journey of the exhibition, presenting perspectives on its major themes and the processes by which it was created. The contributors, including members of the exhibition's Native American Advisory Committee, offer a transformative perspective on museum curation, highlighting the shift towards practice which involves and honors Indigenous communities.
Speakers
Alaka Wali is curator of North American Anthropology in the Science and Education Division of The Field Museum. She was the founding director of the Center for Cultural Understanding and Change from 1995-2010. During that time, she pioneered the development of participatory social science research and community engagement processes based in museum science. She currently curates the North American collection and is leading the curational team working on renovating the Native North American Hall. She has also engaged contemporary Native American artists to collaborate on curation of experimental exhibitions at the Field Museum that incorporate contemporary art with historical items from the Museum's collection. Her research focuses on the relationship between art and the capacity for social resilience. Alaka was born in India and maintains strong ties to her birth homeland.
Tom Skwerski is the Exhibitions Operations Director at The Field Museum of Natural History. In the last twelve years, as Senior Project Manager, he has managed such diverse exhibitions as the Cyrus Tang Hall of China; Terracotta Warriors; Biomechanics; Whales; Mammoths and Mastodons; Darwin; and Genghis Khan. In his position, he oversees all aspects of the creation of an exhibition and works with the exhibit designers, developers, and production staff. Prior to the Field Museum, he was the Exhibition Designer and Chief Preparator at the Terra Museum of American Art, and then Curator at the Springfield Museum of Art (Ohio).
Blaire Morseau is a citizen of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians, beadwork artist, and Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Michigan State University where she is also Affiliate Faculty in Digital Humanities and American Indian and Indigenous Studies. Before becoming a professor, she worked as her tribe's first full-time archivist, launching an online collections and dictionary website called Wiwkwébthëgen using Potawatomi cultural protocols of access and traditional knowledge labels. As Co-Director of The Indigenous Chicago Project, Blaire also helped shape the project's components which include oral histories, digital maps, curricular materials and more, that explore the histories of the region, centering Indigenous voices, laying bare stories of settler-colonial harm, and gesturing toward Indigenous futures. Her expertise is in Indigenous futurisms and science fiction with research interests in digital humanities, counter-mapping, and tribal archives. She recently released an edited volume titled, As Sacred to Us: Simon Pokagon’s Birch Bark Stories In Their Contexts and her debut monograph, Mapping Neshnabé Futurity: Celestial Currents of Sovereignty in Potawatomi Skies, Lands, and Waters.
Christina Friberg is a North American archaeologist and specialist in precolonial Native American societies in the Midwest and Southeast. Her research focuses on the broader impacts of complex non-state societies on outlying communities, and the impacts of endemic warfare on daily life. She is the author of The Making of Mississippian Tradition (University Press of Florida, 2020.)
Cost and Registration
This program is free and open to all. Advance registration required.
Registration opens August 1.
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