From the 1950s until 2019, the Field Museum’s Native North America Hall was a haphazard collection of everyday Indigenous American items. Vague, terse descriptions rendered the artifacts as faceless as the mannequins on display. Field anthropologists had hastily collected the items in the late 19th century, assuming, chillingly, that the cultures of their origin wouldn’t last.
“Native Truths: Our Voices, Our Stories,” which opened this month, is a long-awaited corrective. A four-year project, the permanent exhibit replacing the former Native North America displays brings the history of Native American life in dialogue with its kaleidoscopic present.
Debra Yepa-Pappan, who coordinates Native community engagement at the Field, says she’s received a flood of requests by Indigenous groups to visit the new exhibit, all of which she’s committed to accommodating.
“Just because the exhibition is open now, that’s not the end. That’s the beginning,” Yepa-Pappan says. “The exhibition needs to be viewed as also living and thriving.”
“Native Truths” is by far the most significant effort by the Field to atone for its legacy of culturally insensitive displays about Indigenous Americans, though it’s not the first. North American anthropology curator Alaka Wali has tapped artists to create works both complementing and challenging the Field’s displays, starting with Pawnee artist Bunky Echo-Hawk in 2013. Just before the old Native North America Hall closed to make way for “Native Truths,” an installation of Kaw Nation artist Chris Pappan’s contemporary ledger art quite literally overrode the display cases’ content by laminating his works over the glass.
“Native Truths” treads in their footsteps. Its writer-curators — representing about 100 of the 574 federally recognized Native American tribes in the U.S. — contextualize items from the Field’s holdings through first-person descriptions, mostly relayed via touch screen. Fifty of the 400-plus items on display were commissioned by contemporary Native artists specifically for the exhibit, where they’re juxtaposed with historical artworks and artifacts.
“I consider my legacy pieces to be animate and living. They have that life-force to me,” says Karen Ann Hoffman, an Oneida Nation artist whose Haudenosaunee beadworks are featured in the exhibit. “This might sound a little crazy, but I hear conversations between the art. I would like to come back sometime when it’s very quiet and listen to what they have to say to each other.”
“Native Truths” soft-opened to Native community members on May 14-15, then more formally with an opening celebration on May 21. Programming through opening weekend brought Native exhibit collaborators to Stanley Field Hall to demonstrate basket-weaving and beadwork techniques, the artists chatting amiably with curious observers.
The exhibit is likely precedent-setting in the American museum world. From its conception to its PR campaigns, “Native Truths” was spearheaded by Indigenous curators — a rarity for an institution of the Field’s size and scope. Even the physical materials used to build the exhibit were selected for their cultural significance and connection to Native peoples. For example, the wood used for the floors and benches was donated by Menominee Tribal Enterprises, a Wisconsin-based sustainable lumber provider.
More broadly, “Native Truths” might inspire peer museums to rethink their approach to cultural exhibits. Field Museum exhibitions director Jaap Hoogstraten says the exhibit has not only attracted the attention of other museums but challenged the Field internally to reimagine new paradigms for exhibit curation and design.
“Usually, when curators think of a show, we think of the pacing and the flow. Like, ‘Oh, a third of the way through this hall, I need something big and flashy.’ But very early in the process, our advisers said, ‘Don’t focus on the object — focus on the story,'” Hoogstraten says. “Ultimately, the attitude we developed with ‘Native Truths’ will apply to all cultural exhibits, not just Native American material.”
Nor will those narratives remain static. Field staff estimate the modular exhibit spaces in “Native Truths” will rotate every 18 months or so, ensuring the exhibit maintains a plurality of perspectives. Those currently on display explore everything from the pedagogical lineage of Cahuilla basketweavers in Southern California to the Field’s recent repatriation of seeds bred by the Meskwaki (Fox) in the Great Lakes and greater Midwest.
The module at the exhibit’s heart features displays about Chicago’s Native communities. A 1960s-era photo of the American Indian Center’s Canoe Club paddling down the Chicago River, their voyage framed by skyscrapers and a half-skeletal Hancock Tower, is as apt a summation of “Native Truths” as could be imagined.
Conspicuously absent during the opening weekends and from the Chicago display’s advisory team were members of Chi-Nations Youth Council, one of the city’s most prominent Native activist groups. As was originally reported by WBEZ, the organization had planned to advise on “Native Truths” until summer 2020, when members learned that Chicago Blackhawks chairman Rocky Wirtz also chaired the Field Museum’s board, and dropped out.
Chi-Nations had successfully lobbied the American Indian Center to cut ties with the Blackhawks the year before, following reignited scrutiny about the team’s racially insensitive name and logo. They subsequently began a public campaign to oust Wirtz. As of the exhibit opening this month, Wirtz remained the Field’s board chair.
Chi-Nations Youth Council representatives did not respond to requests for comment by press time. As for the omission, Hoogstraten of the Field maintains that Native collaborators had full control over what appeared in their sections — including the Chicago module, which mostly featured writer-curators from the American Indian Center; the Chicago American Indian Community Collaborative; and the Saint Kateri Center, a Catholic parish serving Native worshippers in Chicago.
“The content in that section reflects that community. It wasn’t the Field Museum editing anything out,” he says.
Field representatives are mostly forthright in acknowledging how much remains to be done. On a recent visit to the exhibit, a couple of passersby could be heard muttering about the Alsdorf Hall of Northwest Coast and Arctic Peoples next door, a dark, musty exhibit that opened in 1982 and has remained mostly the same since. In comparison to “Native Truths,” its content is outdated, contextually emaciated, and — according to Hoogstraten — sometimes culturally inappropriate or inaccurate.
Hoogstraten estimates Alsdorf will be similarly re-imagined within the next five years, possibly with an artistic intervention in the interim.
“We need to do something bold to make sure that people know that we’re aware, and I would hope to get it done before then. But the relationship-building that goes into doing this kind of work collaboratively is time-consuming,” he says.
Though “Native Truths” “exceeded all of (her) expectations,” Hoffman understands some Native visitors’ reticence toward the exhibit. But she’s honored that her beadwork is among the first displays visitors see entering from Stanley Field Hall — in her words, a “welcome mat” — because they pose a question of their own.
“Oneida people have this thing that goes way back, called ‘the edge of the woods.’ If visitors start coming to our village, we’d send folks out to greet them at the edge of the woods so everybody knows what everybody’s about before being welcomed in,” Hoffman says.
“I feel like I’m at the edge of the woods here for people: They get a chance to make a decision. I haven’t seen anybody turn around yet.”
