Many young adults experience frustration or resentment towards their parents while growing up, with parental expectations and belief systems often constraining those attempting to forge their own paths. Children inherit more than just physical features. All too commonly, a parent’s traumatic experiences are reenacted upon their children, passing the trauma down to the next generation. […]

Read more "Inheriting Trauma"

Radical Stitch is a touring exhibit, originally from the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. The exhibit opened on April 30, 2022 and ran until September 25th of that year. The goal of the exhibits curators was to identify “works considered canonical in beadwork’s shift from ‘craft’, to community-based resurgence, and finally into contemporary […]

Read more "Radical Stitch"

Above all, Louise Erdrich’s novel The Painted Drum is a story of repatriation as beginning. Too often, museums look at the repatriation of objects as an ending. “This was once ours,” the thinking goes, “and now it goes to someone else; its history as a numbered and accessioned box on a back shelf is over.” […]

Read more "Louise Erdrich’s The Painted Drum: Repatriation and the Spectre of Indigenous Suppression"

Humans have a tendency to place things in boxes. It’s neater and simpler to understand the world around us by relating new things to things that we already know. Generalizing—and grouping together diversity in life—makes it easier for us to conceptualize and make sense of differences. This can be helpful in some cases; grouping objects […]

Read more "“Calling Out” Museums"

“When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine ” by Jhumpa Lahiri explores the ways in which traumatic histories are taught to children. The story is shaped by its narration from Lilia, an elementary-schooler who has only ever learned about violence from a distance, rather than her parents or Mr. Pirzada, who have experienced it firsthand. Through […]

Read more "Who, When, and How: Teaching Violent Histories to the Next Generation"

The American LGBTQ+ Museum is “a new collaboration dedicated to preserving, researching, and sharing history and culture,” as stated on their website. [1] This new institution is in partnership with the New-York Historical Society and plans to celebrate and preserve queer history and culture in America. Through several lenses, including race, gender, class, immigration, and […]

Read more "Queer Spaces"

Mark Meinke’s “Why LGBTQ Historic Sites Matter” has an enormous task of opening the National Park Service’s theme study on LGBTQ history, which in its entirety is over 1,000 pages long. This chapter opens the immense topic with the very simple statement: “Start here. We exist.”[1]  The way Meinke chooses to start is not inherently […]

Read more "“Why LGBTQ Historic Sites Matter”"

In Maus, Art Spiegelman recounts his father’s experiences as a Jewish person in Poland in the 1920s through World War II. As Spiegelman tells his father’s story, he reflects on his own Jewish identity as an American born post-World War II. Spiegelman grew up in a community and period defined by the Holocaust. Several times […]

Read more "Jewish Religion and Culture Beyond the Holocaust"

Heid E. Erdrich’s poem Guidelines for the Treatment of Sacred Objects takes a humorous approach to a very serious issue that most Indigenous Nations and museums face: What to do with sacred objects? Museums come into possession of artifacts through questionable or antiquated means, and interpret them in cold, isolated environments, leaving Indigenous Nations to […]

Read more "Guidelines for the Treatment of Sacred Objects"