ABSTRACT
As a museum anthropologist with the Smithsonian’s Arctic Studies Center (ASC) I have been humbled by the collecting zeal of the nineteenth-century anthropologists who ranged the world to fill their respective institutions with the curiosities and trash from distant lands and distant epochs. Such things were once daily household objects but have, through the alchemy of time and the miracle of preservation, become the treasures of today. Much of the world’s patrimony that hasn’t been scattered and shorn of its history and provenance has found shelter in museums. Once the purview of a few scholars and a small cadre of museum professionals charged with the curation and care of these collections, the museum world has been transformed within the last decade or so by the enthusiasm and interest of Native groups, artists, and scholars who have, and are in the process of, rediscovering their cultural patrimony.
