The Field Museum’s Renovated ‘Native Truths’ Exhibit Celebrates Contemporary Indigenous Stories

The hall, which includes rotating galleries, shares twenty-first century Native narratives and improves upon the museum’s past problematic representation.

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The Field Museum of Chicago, one of the largest natural history museums in the world, has long been criticized for homogenizing Indigenous groups in its Native North America Hall. For nearly seventy years, the same set of objects and placards have presented derogatory and incorrect depictions of Native cultures, and desecrated some of the sacred items on display. But now, a new permanent exhibit called Native Truths: Our Voices, Our Stories, which opened on May 20, is taking steps to rectify these malpractices. 

Designed to “replace and re-examine” the previous hall, which was created without Native input, Native Truths relied on partnerships with 130 collaborators representing more than 100 tribes across the United States and Canada. Its intent to center Native voices and histories and present them more respectfully is evident from the exhibit’s entrance, which reads “You Are On Native Land.” 

That same sense of inclusion continues through a series of permanent installations, such as Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna), a playable video game based on traditional stories of the Iñupiat people; two wall-sized maps that show how the Ho-Chunk and Miami people survived forced removals from their traditional homelands; and a space to read live articles from Indian Country Today, a nonprofit that features Indigenous news from across the Americas.

Even the benches and flooring, made with wood bought from Menominee Tribal Enterprises, support the focus of Native Truths. And, unlike the old hall it replaces, the Field Museum plans to continually update and expand the new galleries to reflect the evolution of tribes in the present. “Nothing is going to be in here for seventy-plus years,” says Debra Yepa-Pappan, a Korean and Jemez Pueblo artist who has been the Field’s community engagement coordinator since 2018.

Yepa-Pappan, whose artwork is featured in one of the current galleries, held a Native-only opening to the exhibit prior to its official debut. Some of the 200 visitors that day, she says, stayed for hours and were moved to tears. “It’s been really exciting to take Native people in, and see the excitement through their eyes,” Yepa-Pappan says. 

The Field Museum joins a number of institutions across the United States that are reimagining their Native American exhibits, each responding to criticisms drawing attention to their culpability in the misrepresentation of Indigenous cultures. 

Last October, the Denver Art Museum unveiled a four-year renovation which included new Indigenous Arts of North America galleries that centered contemporary artists and stories. In November, the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, Canada, began work on decolonizing its Indigenous halls, after returning seventeen items to Huu-ay-aht First Nations in 2016. And this June, the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis, Indiana, will be reopening its Native American Galleries after decades of largely unchanged exhibitions.

One week before Native Truths opened, the Northwest Coast Hall at the Museum of Natural History in New York made its own public reopening, following a five-year renovation. Like the Field, it bears rotating exhibitions, was curated with significant Native input, opened its archives to Native people, and continues to negotiate the question: even with best intentions and improved curatorial practices, are museums the right place at all for Indigenous items to be displayed? 

“I still believe that that material belongs to us and it will never be given its true value in any other setting than our own Houses,” Haa’yuups, head of the House of Takiishtakamlthat-h of the Huupa‘chesat-h First Nation, and redesigner of the Northwest Coast Hall, told The New York Times.

Yepa-Pappan says that as a Native person, she is always educating non-Natives about her culture and people. Even in a historically colonial space such as the Field, she saw the potential for change and improvement, if done the right way. “If [the exhibit] is for Native people and by Native people, then it's going to feel comfortable to us,” Yepa-Pappan says. “And anyone else that comes in, I think they're gonna have a better learning experience, because we’re welcoming people into our home. And what better way to learn about somebody than to create a personal relationship with someone?”

The opening of Native Truths is simultaneously a celebration and exhalation for the Indigenous curators, artists, and ambassadors who worked on the hall. Though renovations for Native Truths were initially conceived along the same lines of the Field Museum’s retouches to its dinosaur and fossil exhibits, a majority-Native curatorial team “took on a completely different process, and radicalized our approach,” says Tori Lee, an exhibitions developer at the museum. 

Lee, along with other developers and curators, visited tribes on their land and spent years building relationships with the artists featured in the exhibit. “It’s not easy to decolonize a colonial institution,” says Meranda Roberts, an enrolled member of the Yerington Paiute Tribe, post-doctoral researcher at the Field, and a co-curator of the exhibit. “As an Indigenous person, you’re being confronted with legacies that you had no part in, but that you usually have to deal with.”

It was particularly tricky, Roberts adds, to curate a space that is foremost for Native people to share and recognize themselves, while also educating non-Native visitors. And though there is an installation about repatriation, Yepa-Pappan wishes that the museum had been more honest about its past exhibit. “It’s one thing for the museum to admit they caused harm to Native communities,” she says. “It’s another to say, ‘We’re sorry.’ And it’s a whole other thing to say the field of anthropology is guilty as well.” 

The Field Museum keeps 70,000 Native ethnographic materials and 700,000 archeological items in its archives. The old Native North America Hall displayed 1,500 of these objects, often without regard for accuracy or storytelling. In dark-lit spaces, faceless mannequins wore shirts and leggings mismatched from multiple tribes. An emphasis on weaponry, war, famine, and disease dominated the old hall’s themes.

In contrast, Native Truths displays only 400 objects from the museum’s archives. This downsizing, Yepa-Pappan says, was meant to shift the focus onto only those items that depict living stories and narratives. “We are not a people of the past,” a sign reads. “We are a living people with a past.”

Frank Waln, a touring hip-hop artist and three-time Native American Music Award winner, was one of the first people Yepa-Pappan reached out to when the exhibit’s renovation was announced. “For many years, until Deb [Yepa-Pappan] got there, I thought the Field Museum was like the Death Star—you couldn’t get inside,” Waln says. 

Members of Chicago’s Native community had warned Waln of the old hall: the dust that covered eagle feathers—sacred to plains tribes, including the Lakota—and the holes in rattles nailed to the wall. “I have a spiritual connection to those objects,” Waln says. “It felt like visiting relatives in prison. You want to take them home, to free them, to put them where they’re supposed to be.” 

But after three years of planning, pitching, and hard work, Waln had his own music studio recreated within Native Truths. He was able to sample some of the instruments that had been kept in collections, and videos show him playing and explaining the significance of the instruments. Visitors can create a composition with recordings of Waln’s instruments, and email it to themselves—a detail of interactiveness and reciprocity that Waln felt was important to include.

Waln says it is a strange feeling to have his work displayed in a space that he wanted no part of just a few years earlier. He credits Yepa-Pappan and the other Native women with “shielding” him from the museum’s collecting practices and old exhibit, allowing him to focus on his vision for the new space, and to reconnect with his relatives. 

“The standard in museums is whiteness,” he says. “But let’s flip it on its head, and let Native people present themselves how they want to the world. You know, there’s dinosaurs in the museum and there’s dinosaurs running it. But I’ll say, we did our best and I’m very proud of everything you’re gonna see. You’re gonna get a wide variety of what it means to be Native.”