Penn Museum Unveils New Native North America Gallery

Alongside eight Indigenous consulting curators, the gallery explores self-determination and resilience—despite cultural erasure.

In partnership with eight Indigenous consulting curators, the Penn Museum will unveil its new Native North America Gallery with a public opening celebration on Saturday, November 22. A continuation of the Museum's work with Native specialists for more than a century, it will explore the political, religious, linguistic, and artistic self-determination of Native peoples across the United States who are still thriving—despite a historic agenda to erase Indigenous identity, culture, and language.

These Native-led stories will offer nuance and complexity in telling the nation's history as it approaches its 250th year. Uplifting cultural continuity, resilience, and creativity, the Native North America Gallery will reframe Native American histories.

Through its recognition of Indigenous deep histories, including upheaval amid centuries of betrayals, it will simultaneously draw attention to today's Indigenous ideas, technologies, and art—alongside the ongoing challenges Native peoples still face.

Through more than 250 archaeological, historic, and contemporary items from the Penn Museum's North American collections, the 2,000 square foot multisensory gallery‘s purposeful design will foster an immersive visitor experience—from its first-person videos, interactive stations, color palette and motifs to including Native languages throughout the interpretive text. Following best practices in the care and conservation of the Native works, periodic rotations of the items on display will offer Museum guests a fresh look.

The oldest items on view inside the Native North America Gallery will be the earliest in the Penn Museum's collections—projectile points dating back to 9500 BCE. Recovered during a 1936 expedition near Clovis, New Mexico, they were carefully shaped into spearpoints for hunting. The newest will be Parceled Space #2, a woven piece specifically commissioned from Cherokee artist Brenda Mallory, whose mixed media sculptural works imply tenuous connections and repair, addressing interference and disruption in long-established systems.

Upon entering the Native North America Gallery, guests will encounter an empty case—recognizing repatriation and honoring Native views about which items are appropriate for display in museums—an essential point of discussion for the Indigenous consulting curators.

"The inclusion of an empty display case is a deliberate intervention—not an act of censorship. It serves as a thoughtful prompt for visitors to reflect on the fraught relationship between museums and Indigenous communities," said Dr. Joseph Aguilar, Tribal Historic Preservation Office Board Member, San Ildefonso Pueblo and Consulting Curator of the Native North America Gallery. "In its absence, the object becomes an act of Indigenous sovereignty—an assertion of agency over the stewardship and future of cultural heritage."

The new gallery will examine how Indigenous peoples have struggled, yet succeeded in maintaining their homelands, languages, and traditions. It builds on the 10-year success of the Museum's previous exhibition, Native American Voices: The People-Here and Now.

"Following the lead of eight insightful Native American consulting curators, this beautiful exhibition introduces archaeology, traditional knowledge, nuanced histories, and art from four distinct regions of the United States. This project underscores the important ongoing work of the Penn Museum to illuminate the Native American experience and some of the meanings and significance of our collections from Native homelands," said Dr. Lucy Fowler Williams, Co- Curator of the Native North America Gallery, Associate Curator-in-Charge, and Sabloff Keeper of the North American Section at the Penn Museum. "Working closely with our Native colleagues over a two-year period has been an honor. Their contributions bring new light and life to our collections and help visitors understand some of the unique and enduring Native American ideas and perspectives."

The Native North America Gallery will showcase compelling first-person outlooks from four areas with especially strong connections to the Penn Museum's collections: 

• Northeast: Longevity of Lënapehòkink (Delaware/Lenape)
• Southeast: Persistent Places and Traditions (Eastern Band Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek))
• Southwest: We Are Seeking Life (Pueblo)
• Northwest: Stewardship around the Gulf of Alaska (Tlingit, Alutiiq)

The center of the Native North America Gallery will unify all four corners with rich opportunities for the public to participate in preserving endangered cultural technologies—offering interactive stations where Museum visitors can listen to Native languages and try their hand at traditional weaving techniques. In addition, it will feature a space dedicated to the importance of Native collaborations involving representation, research, loans, and relationship-building with museums today.

"This exhibit weaves together deep histories with the recent past and contemporary experience of Native communities to demonstrate Native people have survived extreme hardship over generations, but still endure, and today are perpetuating cultural practices that developed over thousands of years," said Dr. Megan C. Kassabaum, Weingarten Associate Curator at the Penn Museum. "Indigenous representation in museums is a complex part of America's painful colonial history and relationships continue to evolve. We are committed to making sure this necessary, collaborative work continues."

Learn more about the new Native North America Gallery—which is included with Penn Museum admission—here.

Courtesy of Groups Today.