I'm a little surprised that I didn't post about just how transformed the American Museum of Natural History's celebrated Northwest Coast hall was when I checked it out two years ago. In a gallery now curated by and with the indigenous nations whose works are shared, the viewer is invited into living cultural worlds, rather than observing with rueful fascination the salvage of supposedly dead and dying ones. Now we learn how this salvage contributed to the destruction of the cultures in question - often AMNH agents purchased religious objects whose use had been outlawed by Christian legislators - but that the cultures endured and thrive.
I was struck by how the tables of "science" and "religion" were turned here, the cultural power of the AMNH, which had so long "scientifically" rendered native practices as quaint or sinister "myth" and "ritual," now used to introduce supernatural worlds and powers as true elements of reality.
