Building Collaborations Between American Indians
and European Museums

About the Project

Restoring Ancestral Connections is a project funded by German Marshall Fund grants. The project’s goal is to help support mutually beneficial relationships and productive dialogue between European museums and the American Indian/Alaska Native communities that have cultural items across the Atlantic. The project is intended to be implemented over a period of three years. Restoring Ancestral Connections aims to function as a platform to facilitate relationship building that enables meaningful collaborations between tribes and European museums, productive dialogue around the stewardship of American Indian/Alaska Native cultural objects in museum institutions, and opportunities for tribes to reconnect with cultural artifacts and the communities that currently maintain these artifacts in their possession. The projects is a collaborative effort between the project founders, museums, and American Indian/Alaska Native tribes.

Project History

To consider a meaningful project to fulfill the goals of the Restoring Ancestral Connections initiative, project partners began by considering whether and how European museums might work with American Indian/Alaska Native tribes more collaboratively, the types of relationships museums might like to build with tribes, opportunities for tribes to interact with European museums and gain access to European collections, and European contexts relevant to the project. After a series of conversations, project partners decided that an appropriate initiative would be to create a centralized platform to connect European museums with American Indian/Alaska Native communities who might want to know more about American Indian/Alaska Native collections in Europe and connect with European museums remotely or in person.

Please read this letter from Restoring Ancestral Connections Founders

Who we are

Project leads implementing the German Marshall Fund grants are:

Partners

As the project matures, we hope that the list of collaborators will expand to include additional museums and tribal partners. To date, collaborators include:

Museum Partners

Amber Lincoln
Curator, British Museum
London, United Kingdom

Henrietta Lidchi
Chief Curator, Wereld Culturen
Leiden, Holland

Meghan O’Brien Backhouse
Deputy Head of Collections, Pitt Rivers Museum
Oxford, United Kingdom

Laura Van Broekhoven
Director, Pitt Rivers Museum
Oxford, United Kingdom

Tribal Partners

Delaware Tribe

Hopi Tribe

Southern Ute Tribe

Ute Mountain Ute Tribe