What is this project?
We are looking at museums.
In 2017 members of the Nakoda AV Club started a project called Wonagetha: Learning Our Stories. This project was funded by the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and through it members of the Club visited Glenbow Museum, Whyte Museum, Buffalo Nations Museum, and other heritage sites in the bow valley to look at how stories of Nakoda people were told. Part of this project resulted in facilitating a visit to the Glenbow for students of Mînîthnî Community School and a group of Elders. The belongings that the group visited, and the stories and connections made through this work stayed with the Club members and impacted their storytelling practices.
As more people in Mînîthnî heard about this work, and about Jarret Twoyoungmen's partner Amanda Foote, who worked in museums they began asking about belongings in museums, and the legacies of their ancestors. Amanda began looking into how to build connections between community members and museums.
Amanda started developing a research project about building these connections. At the same time, some Nakoda AV Club members were being asked to do more and more work at the Whyte Museum. Nakoda AV Club members were contributing to programming, and also began filming for a documentary about the museum.
Because of these things, we started visiting museums more and more. First we were just visiting to see what we could see, but soon we started working on two projects: 1) looking for Stoney Nakoda belongings in museums, and 2) learning how other Indigenous communities run their own museums and heritage sites.
This is what our project is working on now. We look for Stoney Nakoda belongings in museums, and we build relationships with those belongings and those around them (museum staff, relatives of the maker, new lands and the Indigenous people where the belongings are today). We learn about ways other Indigenous people engage with museums. We visit their sites, we participate in workshops, we talk, we build relationships. And we share what we find with Stoney Nakoda people. That's what this website is about too.