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A critical survey of the values, challenges, implications, history, and future of conserving Indigenous collections globally.

Once the exclusive realm of non-Indigenous curators and conservators, the care of Indigenous works in museums is now largely carried out either in collaboration with or by community members—a significant change from the colonial origins of museum collections and conservation practice.

This volume brings together over 100 readings—by Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors from around the world—that trace the development of the conservation of Indigenous collections. The writers provide a wide range of expertise, from archaeology and ethnography to law, and include community leaders, anthropologists, and art historians, as well as conservators and curators.

The book begins with an examination of the changes in terminology that reflect trust and respect, Indigenous care practices that predate the emergence of museums, and the impact of policy and legislation on Indigenous art and artifacts. Other readings explore the challenges associated with managing large, complex collections and the changes that resulted from addressing them: the development of specialized technical approaches, the incorporation of intangible heritage in conservation agendas, and a broadening view of what conservation means and how to practice it. Indigenous Collections concludes by looking at new approaches to museums—managed by or jointly with the people most closely connected to the holdings—and to the future, through innovations in conservation education.

In Inland Empire, Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió examines how modernist architecture and urban design structured US settler colonialism and capitalist hegemony in the twentieth century. Focusing on Palm Springs’s settlement upon the Agua Caliente Reservation and other reservations in inland Southern California, he shows how architecture became a key technology for governing empire at the height of the state’s drive to terminate Native American sovereignty. Through extensive archival research and dialogue with Cahuilla, Kumeyaay, and other Tribal community members, Shvartzberg Carrió offers a new architectural history of modernism. Carefully placing the work of seminal California architects within the genealogy of manifest destiny, he demonstrates how their designs over settler and Native housing, prefabrication technologies, the logistics of migrant construction labor, community development plans, and environmental infrastructures offered new ways of managing Indigenous resistance—a spatial turn in Native American administration that constituted a veritable workshop for neoliberalization policies later sponsored globally by the United States. Charting Indigenous nations’ responses to these momentous challenges, Inland Empire details how they deployed novel modes of resistance grounded in Native architectural histories, spatial practices, and epistemologies of land.

A rhetorical analysis of Civil War battlefields and parks, and the ways various commemorative traditions—and their ideologies of race, reconciliation, emancipation, and masculinity—compete for dominance.

The National Park Service (NPS) is known for its role in the preservation of public sites deemed to have historic, cultural, and natural significance. In Interpreting Sacred Ground, J. Christian Spielvogel studies the NPS’s secondary role as an interpreter or creator of meaning at such sites, specifically Gettysburg National Military Park, Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, and Cold Harbor Visitor Center.

Spielvogel studies in detail the museums, films, publications, tours, signage, and other media at these sites, and he studies and analyzes how they shape the meanings that visitors are invited to construct. Though the NPS began developing interpretive exhibits in the 1990s that highlighted slavery and emancipation as central facets to understanding the war, Spielvogel argues that the NPS in some instances preserves outmoded narratives of white reconciliation and heroic masculinity, obscuring the race-related causes and consequences of the war as well as the war’s savagery.

The challenges the NPS faces in addressing these issues are many, from avoiding unbalanced criticism of either the Union or the Confederacy, to foregrounding race and violence as central issues, preserving clear and accurate renderingsof battlefield movements and strategies, and contending with the various public constituencies with their own interpretive stakes in the battle for public memory.

Spielvogel concludes by arguing for the National Park Service’s crucial role as a critical voice in shaping twentieth-first-century Civil War public memory and highlights the issues the agency faces as it strives to maintain historical integrity while contending with antiquated renderings of the past.