School for Advanced Research (Indian Arts Research Center)

The School for Advanced Research will create an Indigenous collections care guide to support the museum field with an accessible reference tool for professionals who interact regularly with Native American collections. The guide will provide museums with a framework to recenter collections stewardship practices around the needs and knowledge of Indigenous community members. Production of the guide will be led by a diverse group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous professionals in collaboration with a working group, who will facilitate organizing the information shared by the community experts and framing it in a way that is accessible, usable, and relevant to museum and academic professionals. At the conclusion of the project, 175 tribal community representatives and museum professionals will have had a voice in the development of the guide which will be freely available for tribal community representatives and museums of all sizes. The completion of the guide will be marked with a free virtual four-part speaker series, hosted by Gilcrease Museum's Helmerich Center for American Research. The guide itself will live on the School for Advanced Research website and be freely available as text or to download.