In Spring 2023, students in Prof. Mark Auslander’s seminar Decolonizing Museums (Anth 316DM) at Mount Holyoke College developed five separate community-engaged projects, oriented towards the decolonization of power and knowledge in museums and related heritage institutions.
Campus/South Hadley Projects
Three of our projects are primarily geared towards transformative work on the Mount Holyoke campus and the immediate South Hadley MA environs:
1. Re-indigenizing the Mount Holyoke College campus landscape, with an emphasis on a proposed indigenous sweetgrass garden, culturally-sensitive trail signage, and rendering land acknowledgement as a living presence across the campus space. This project builds on proposals developed by students in earlier courses offered by Prof. Sabra Thorner, including Declonizing Museums in Spring 2022.
2. Enslavement and its legacies in South Hadley, including a community task force on slavery and memory;
3. Recontextualizing a Shinto Inari Shrine from Mito, Japan, currently stored with the College’s Joseph Allen Skinner Museum, with attention to potential restorative justice and ethical concerns;
Projects at a Distance
Two projects are collaborative partnerships with initiatives outside of Massachusetts:
4. Restorative justice associated with the legacies of the October 1878 racial terror lynching in Mount Vernon, Indiana with special attention to the appropriate contextualization of a photograph of this atrocity, currently on display on the web space of the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University.
5. Environmental education initiatives for the Whale Sanctuary Project, under development in Port Hilford, Nova Scotia, including a proposed ‘zine for K-12 students.
All of these exploratory projects consider ethically responsible ways to work with diverse stakeholders and community members, including, as appropriate, indigenous partners and descendants of impacted individuals and families.
Please feel free to share feedback and constructive suggestions on any of these projects with Dr. Mark Auslander
Acknowledgements
Ren Block served as as the peer mentor for the course, helping coordinate the five project teams. We are grateful to our many community partners for their continuing guidance on these five linked projects. At Mount Holyoke we are particularly grateful to staff members of the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and the Joseph Allen Skinner Museum; the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI); the Office of Community and Belonging; the Miller Worley Center for the Environment; Archives and Special Collections, the Educational Technology team, and many other colleagues in Library, Information, and Technology Services.
Mount Holyoke College Land Acknowledgement
Mount Holyoke College is located in Western Massachusetts on the ancestral land of the Nonotuck people. It is also important to acknowledge the neighboring Indigenous nations who continue to be connected to this land: the Nipmuc and the Wampanoag to the East, the Mohegan and Pequot to the South, the Mohican to the West and the Abenaki to the North.
Please note, students on Decolonizing Museums, Spring 2023, have authored a statement sharing their reflections on the practice of land acknowlegement.