ABSTRACT
Native American arts are still radically underrepresented in arts institutions, both academic and museological, perhaps because they are less easily aligned with Western fine-art media and genres than African, Oceanic, or PreColumbian objects. The tendency of poststructuralist and postcolonial critiques of the museum has been to flatten out the distinction between art and artifact. Many individual Native people were led by this process to collaborate in the process of collecting, believing that the museum was the only place in which a record of aboriginal cultures would eventually be preserved. Part of the postcolonial Native American agenda has been the outright removal of certain classes of objects from the kind of democratic exposure enjoined by the art gallery or museum. Michael Baxandall has described the museum exhibition as a field in which at least three agents are independently in play – makers of objects, exhibitors of made objects, and viewers of exhibited made objects.
