We aspire to curate the best understood and most ethically held anthropology collection in North America.
This new and bold objective will build from the DMNS’s past successes to look forward to the future of anthropology as an inclusive and dynamic scientific pursuit. A key part of this initiative will be the inclusion of Native American perspectives and voices at the DMNS, cultivating novel partnerships that create better and more holistic understandings of Native American culture and history.
Our vision is to build a museum and a discipline that combines Native American voices with the best of scientific research so that Indigenous cultural treasures can be appreciated from every perspective—aesthetic, historical, scholarly, and cultural. The way forward is by building mutually beneficial collaborations between museums and Native American communities. A key part of this strategy will be welcoming Native Americans into the museum and finding creative ways for their voices to be heard.
The first two projects under the purview of the new initiative are the Indigenous Fellowship Program and First Nations Film and Video Festival. This initiative is made possible by the generous support of the Avenir Foundation.
