Steps Towards Decolonizing a Museum

Learning Lessons

Serving Our Public Audiences

The year 2020 has brought many changes to museums. Among the most important are the actions towards decolonization. The artifacts at the Penn Museum are from myriad cultures, but the narrative around them rarely comes from those cultures themselves. Instead, museum experts, mostly trained in colonial and European traditions, interpret the artifacts, opening the door to white supremacist perspectives. Acknowledging that, the Learning and Public Engagement staff is taking steps to decolonize our teaching.

Decolonizing is a multi-pronged process. It includes sharing the voices of marginalized people, welcoming more diverse learners, employing a diverse teaching staff, and building relationships outside our building. Although this work will take a long time and be ongoing, some early steps have already begun.

All of our lessons now include a land acknowledgment of Lenapehoking, the ancestral lands of the Unami Lenape tribe, where the Penn Museum rests. We have updated some cultural terms in programs. For example, our Egyptian programming now uses the name Kemet, the word the ancient Egyptians had for their country.

Another example of this work comes from our Native American Voices tour. We’ve added a short video from the YouTube channel Kel’s a Funny Girl. In it, the creator, Raquel Quinones, shares some of the slang she uses with friends on the Spirit Lake Reservation in North Dakota. The video is fun and relatable for our school aged audience. It also gives a peek into the culture of at least one tribe today.

For the rest of this article, I’ve invited Kel to tell you more about her channel.

---

MY NAME IS RAQUEL QUINONES, and I am a Dakota Sioux from the Spirit Lake Tribe in Saint Michael, North Dakota. I’m mixed—my dad is Puerto Rican and my mom is Native American. My mom raised me with the best of both worlds. I spent half of my life living on the reservation and the other half living in the city. I started my YouTube channel seven years ago in the hopes of finding an outlet to express myself and to have Native American representation.

So with all of that, I wanted to talk to y’all about Native American humor and share with you one of my blog posts about that. If you watch any of my videos, I have a big sense of humor and a lot of that influence is from living on the reservation.

Native American Humor 101

1. If a Native person makes fun of you, that means they like you.
   I get this all of the time when I’m making fun of a new friend—“Oh my gosh Kel, you’re so mean”—but I’m actually not trying to be mean, I enjoy you as a friend and I’m letting you know by making fun of you. Teasing or “roasting” each other is a love language on the reservation, and if we make fun of you, that means that we like you and we’ve accepted you as one of
   our own.
2. If a Native person ignores you, that’s when you should be worried.
   Native people can never be fake; we are the realest people you will ever meet. So when we tease you, that means we like you, but if we’re not teasing you and we’re quiet around you, then that means we aren’t comfortable around you and we probably don’t like you. Like I said, teasing is a love language for us and if we are in situations where we can’t express that, it’s like a fish being out of water, we need to express humor because it’s who we are as people.
3. Making jokes/laughing helps us cope.
   Life as a Native American is a unique experience, having faced many challenges. We have had oppression hit our communities for over 400 years. A way that we “deal” and “cope” with our feelings is joking about our situations and laughing about them, because that’s the thing that has made us resilient for all of this time. No matter what has happened to us, we can still have a great attitude and put a smile on our face because you cannot break us. We are still here and we are not going anywhere. In the meantime, we’re going to have high spirits, laugh a lot and make fun of you while doing all of that.

Native American humor is very dark. I believe that since we’ve been through so much throughout history, the way we’ve prevailed is through our humor. I know personally that a lot of non-native people haven’t understood my humor; they hear it and they get very uncomfortable. So today I wanted to educate you guys in understanding Native humor a little better, so that it won’t sound like a foreign language.

So those are my three points about Native American humor for ya’ll. I hope you guys learned something and the next time you’re around a Native person, you can look for some of these characteristics. I enjoyed teaching you guys this and I’m excited for you to learn more.

If y’all are interested in more information about me, you can go subscribe to my YouTube channel “Kel’s A Funny Girl”; you can also follow me on Instagram @kelsafunnygirl and on Twitter @Kelsafunnygirl. Thank y’all so much!

Kevin Schott is Associate Director for Interpretive Programs in the Learning and Public Engagement Department; Raquel Quinones is a Native American YouTube Personality and Social Media Influencer.