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Sovereign Curation: Placing Indigenous Knowledge Carriers at Center

Monday, February 13, 2023, 11 a.m.–12:30 p.m. in the Study | Gabrielle Tayac
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Chehalis master basket weaver and political scientist, Yvonne Dupuis Peterson Toon Nee Mu Sh, and her daughter reconnect with an ancestral basket family at the National Museum of the American Indian's Cultural Resources Center in Suitland, Maryland. 2019. Credit: Gabrielle Tayac

What happens when an indigenous knowledge carrier directs a curator to collect, archive, and interpret her legacy? Sacred narratives, ancestral lineage objects, documentary materials, and dynamic practices transmit and transform in diverse Native places. With grandmother teachers in mind, Gabrielle Tayac is innovating an approach called sovereign curation. As an inaugural curator and historian at the National Museum of the American Indian, Gabi devoted 18 years to co-creating indigenized museology and community-engaged public history on a major scale. Yet the museum still set an external institution as the accountable framework. Mobilization and persistence asserted best practices including consultation and consent, all hard won gains defying colonial erasures. Sovereign curation moves integral place-based indigenous knowledge holders to the center.

Gabrielle Tayac, PhD (Piscataway) is a public historian and community-engaged curator who centers indigenous knowledge sovereignties. She was an inaugural curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian for nearly two decades, focusing exhibitions on complex identities, social movements, justice, and belonging across the hemisphere. Gabi maintains a specialization in the Chesapeake Bay and continues to activate deep intergenerational care. She speaks and consults widely across academic, tribal, and civic sectors. Gabi is an Associate Professor of Public History at George Mason University and guest curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Her most recent major permanent exhibition, Native New York, opened at NMAI in 2021. She holds a BS in social work from Cornell University and an AM and PhD in sociology from Harvard University.