Land Acknowledgement – Action

In our land acknowledgement, Boston Children’s Museum states: Boston Children’s Museum commits to taking action, building relationships with, and collaborating with our Indigenous neighbors. The actions the Museum takes fall into three main categories:

• Offering training and professional development for our staff
  • Our most recent related professional development experience was a review of Massachusett History, facilitated by Thomas Green, Massachusett Tribal Leader.
• Collaborating with Indigenous people to showcase educational programming for our visitors
  • Recent programs include hosting Native American Indian Center of Boston members to visit the Museum Collection, a Hubbub Bowl Games workshop facilitated by a visiting educator from the Tomaquag Museum, and “What to Return? Uncovering the Hidden Histories of Museum Objects,” a discussion-based program inviting visitors to examine whether collections objects should be kept or returned to its original owner, with a focus on fairness and empathy.
• Actively working to repatriate Indigenous belongings from the Museum’s Collection and highlighting Indigenous Collections belongings only in collaboration with Indigenous groups
  • To learn more about Boston Children’s Museum’s work with NAGPRA, please visit our What is NAGPRA and how is Boston Children’s Museum working on NAGPRA? webpage.

Boston Children’s Museum has a long history of collecting Indigenous belongings, collaborating with Indigenous groups, and creating educational resources in partnership with Indigenous partners. To learn more about this history, see the timeline below.

• 2024: Boston Children’s Museum offers free admission to the Museum for Tribal ID holders during Native American Heritage Month.
• 2023: Lorén M. Spears, Executive Director of Tomaquag Museum and Naragansett Tribal Nation citizen is the speaker for Boston Children’s Museum’s annual meeting. Lorén and her mother were key experts who helped the Museum create exhibits and programs over many years.
• 2020-Today: Much of the Museum’s current work focuses on repatriation of belongings in our collection to Indigenous groups. To learn more about recent repatriation efforts, click on the links below:
  • 2024 Notice of Intent to Repatriate to Onondaga Nation
  • 2024 Notice of Inventory Completion, Onondaga Nation
  • 2023 Notice of Intent to Repatriate to Quapaw Nation
  • 2023 Notice of Intent to Repatriate to Choctaw Nation
  • 2023 Notice of Intent to Repatriate to Muscogee (Creek) Nation
• 2012 – 2017: Native Voices exhibit is created in collaboration with five Indigenous groups from the Northeast. The exhibit travels across the country. Goals included dispelling stereotypes and correcting misinformation; developing appreciation for the ways in which Indigenous people have sustained, transmitted, and adapted their cultural traditions; building awareness of the vitality and diversity of tribal nations in the Northeast region; and to inspiring appreciation and the desire to learn more about Native traditions among Native and non-Native visitors. The exhibit and public programs were developed with advisors from all of the tribes represented.
• 1978 – 2003: We’re Still Here exhibit is created. Building on relationships and successes from the precursor, “They’re Still Here” exhibit, museum staff worked in collaboration with Native advisors on this exhibit with the help of NEH funding. Alongside a traditional wigwam, the exhibit added context of a 20th-century home to highlight that native peoples continue to exist contemporarily alongside other visitors.
• 1970-1978: In 1974, Boston Children’s Museum began a Native American advisory board and internship program. Tall Oak, a member of the Board, remembered: “…what stays out in my mind is that we were a functioning board. We weren’t a rubber stamp board. That’s what I enjoyed the best about traveling up there each of the times I went, because it was worth the trip. Because I knew you were really listening to what we said. Not only listening, but I knew you were going to translate everything that came out of those discussions and comments into some kind of reality. And before you implemented it and put it into the work, you were going to consult with us again. You actually used us consultants. You didn’t just give us the title and not really use us. That was a refreshing change from the way museums had always been. You were a pioneer, I would say.”
• To learn much more about the Native American Advisory Board and Interns, see the “Working Together To Get It Right” chapter of Boston Children’s Museum’s book, Boston Stories.
• They’re Still Here, a new collections program, added modern examples of Indigenous crafts to the Collection, with the intention of showing that Native peoples are still alive and engaging in the making of art. Emphasis was placed on the Wompanoag, Narragansett, and Penobscot tribes. As part of this project, oral history interviews with the individuals who created the accessioned belongings were conducted. Artists and advisors included Princess Redwing and Tall Oak. At the same time, an educational kit for use in classrooms was created, called Indians Who Meet the Pilgrims, and it was designed to focus on the Native perspective.
• 1965 (approx.) – 1970: A Wigwam exhibit was created to add a more concrete interactive element to the Indian Room. The exhibit again focused on the culture from the past, about 300 years ago.
• 1930s-1960: The “Indian Room” exhibit displays native belongings. While a popular space in the Museum, the Room portrayed the history of the native people as static and of the past.
• 1913: The first native belongings are received in the museum’s first year.