Mille Lacs Indian Museum Book Review

In Amy Lonetree’s book, Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums, analyzes Native American museums and how they interpret the difficult history of colonization in American museums. She uses the three examples of the Mille Lacs Indian Museum, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, and Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways to demonstrate the partial success, failure, and ongoing triumph of the museums.
Over a span of about twenty years Lonetree explores how new museum theory changed interpretation of the same subject and how different museums interpreted decolonization to varying levels of success. Lonetree argues that successful examples of decolonization in Native American museums includes tying the history to the Native community, relating the history to pre-colonization until today, and including the hard truths of western colonization on Natives. She sums up her idea of successful museum interpretation as incorporating “one of the most important goals...is to assist communities in their efforts to address the legacies of historical unresolved grief by speaking the hard truths of colonialism and thereby creating spaces for healing and
Beginning with the Mille Lacs Indian Museum Lonetree claims that the exhibitions “present a rich, ongoing history, but it does so in a manner that avoids challenging or difficult topics, specifically, the impact of colonization” (Lonetree 35). Lonetree also claims the avoidance of hard truths of colonization is often the case in museum interpretation of native history. For Mille Lacs, there was an attempt to portray the Native population in both a historical and contemporary context, but in the end the exhibition fell short from what Lonetree deemed an effective exhibition regarding