These eleven students read the exhibition alongside their core texts for the semester: Amy Lonetree, Decolonizing Museum Practice; Susan Dion, Braided Learning; and Philip Deloria, Becoming Mary Sully. They met regularly as a class with the Mead’s head of education and curator of academic programs, Emily Potter-Ndiaye, and, in small groups of two and three students, developed additional offerings in relation to particular sections of the first Boundless exhibition, each of which is linked here.

Along the way they visited Missy Roser (Frost Library) to learn how to develop their research projects, with Kendra Weisbin (Mount Holyoke College Art Museum) to learn about drafting labels, and visited the Eric Carle Children’s Museum and UMASS Art Gallery.

They also worked closely with Brandon Castle (enrolled member of the Ketchikan Indian Community and descendant of the Tsimshian Peoples and Project Coordinator, Mapping Native Intellectual Networks of the Northeast, Archives & Special Collections, Amherst College) to curate a small exhibition of texts in the library from the same Native American literature collection that was a collaborator on Boundless. In their projects, they seek to manifest some of Lonetree’s ideas of how to approach a decolonizing museum practice, through truth-telling, creating space for healing from generational trauma from colonization, and education. They also aim to reflect indigenizing processes, through dialogue, by highlighting the plurality and diversity within the very concept of Native America, and by centering knowledge in many forms, including beadmaking, language reclamation, and recipes. Click on the links below to see their work. 

About the Instructors

Professor Kiara Vigil (Dakota) is currently Dean of New Students and associate professor of American Studies at Amherst College. She has served as a Council Member for the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association and currently edits the journal SAIL (Studies in American Indian Literatures). She has a PhD is in American Culture from the University of Michigan and her research and teaching is grounded in Native American and Indigenous Studies. Her first book Indigenous Intellectuals: Sovereignty, Citizenship, and the American Imagination, 1890-1930 was published by Cambridge University Press, 2015. She has published several articles and essays in peer-reviewed journals and books, one of which, “Who was Henry Standing Bear? Remembering Lakota Activism from the Early Twentieth Century,” won the Frederick C. Luebke Award for Outstanding Regional Scholarship from the Great Plains Quarterly. Her new book, Natives in Transit: Indian Entertainment, Urban Life, and Activism is a cultural history of Native performance and activist networks from the mid-twentieth century. Kiara is also working with other Dakota linguistic experts and cultural knowledge keepers on a Dakota Language translation and scholarly project centered on the rare newspaper “Iapi Oaye,” which has funding support from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. 

Emily Potter-Ndiaye is the Dwight and Kirsten Poler and Andrew W. Mellon head of education and curator of academic programs at the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College. Prior to Amherst College, Emily led education programs and teams as director of education at Brooklyn Historical Society and as an educator at New York Historical Society, the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco, and in schools. Her formal education includes an undergraduate degree in history, with a focus on dance from Macalester College and a master’s degree in museum studies from New York University. In her work as a museum educator, she aims to bring people together across boundaries by telling better, fuller stories about ourselves and each other.

With thanks to:

Zoe Jacobs Feinstein, Center for Community Engagement, Amherst College
Amanda Herman, University Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Carolyn Gennari, Digital Projects Coordinator, Mead Art Museum