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Training
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Online Museum Classes
Description:
Establishing a Tribal museum – or even just expanding or enhancing one – can be quite daunting. It is a job that demands a clear community vision and an organized approach, which make a tremendous difference for the museum’s future. Establishing a Tribal Museum will provide the facts and comprehensive advice you need to undertake this endeavor. This includes considering how your Tribe's museum can get the community and financial support it needs. The course walks students through specific steps and considerations to clarify the process of establishing and maintaining a successful Tribal museum. These steps include writing a mission statement, understanding community expectations, and establishing a collections policy. Students will explore the potential role of the museum within their Native community and key considerations when establishing a tribal museum. Topics include collections care, community expectations and benefit, registration, the role of traditional culture and language within the museum setting, exhibitions, conservation, staffing and financial management.
Course Outline:
- First Steps: Community Input – What will our museum do/be?
Develop Purpose, Incorporation, Bylaws
- Organizing: Forming Your Group - What is the role of the museum in the community? Structure?
- Governance: Mission Statement, Policies, Procedures, Board of Directors
- Financial Management: Budgets, Fundraising, Endowments, Cash Flow
- Location: Buildings, Grounds, Accessibility
- Collection: Obtaining, Classifying, Registering, Accessioning
- Staffing: Volunteers, Employees, Docents
- Storage: Methods, Integrity, Security
- Exhibits: Planning, Spaces, Viewer Dynamics, Security
- Museum Programming: Exploring opportunities to work with Elders, Community involvement, Using artifacts, Being of benefit to the community, Being of benefit to the non-native community
Textbook:
Starting Right: A Basic Guide to Museum Planning (American Association for State and Local History Book Series) by Gerald George and Cindy Sherrell-Leo, Altamira Press 1986
Logistics:
Participants in Establishing a Tribal Museum work through sections on their own. Materials and resources include online literature, slide lectures and dialog between students and the instructor through online forums. The course is limited to 20 participants.
Sign up for this class with NATHPO at www.nathpo.org
Students must be staff at a tribal institution and meet
NATHPO qualifications. This course is subsidized by the
Institute of Museum and Library Services through a
grant awarded to NATHPO.
Establishing a Tribal Museum runs four weeks.
The Instructors:
Stacey Halfmoon is the Director of Community Outreach and Public Programs for the American Indian Cultural Center and Museum in Oklahoma City, OK. She graduated from the University of Oklahoma with a Bachelor of Arts and Sciences Degree in Anthropology and began working for the Caddo Nation's Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act program. Stacey was instrumental in the tribe's first repatriation of ancestral remains and constructing the tribe's repatriation cemetery. Stacey has since served as Senior Tribal Liaison for the U.S. Department of Defense, where she managed a $10 million dollar Indian lands cleanup program. In 2005, Stacey was appointed Interim Director of the Caddo Heritage Museum. She currently serves on the Caddo Heritage Museum and Jacobson House & Jacobson Foundation boards.
Claudia Nicholson is Executive Director of the North Star Museum of Boy Scouting and Girl Scouting in North St. Paul, MN. Claudia began her career in museums at the National Archives in Washington, DC. After earning her Masters Degree in History Museum Studies from the Cooperstown Graduate Program, she became Curator of Collections for the South Dakota State Historical Society in Pierre. While there, she worked with a Native American advisory committee to create a groundbreaking exhibit on Sioux life in South Dakota. After seven years, she moved to St. Paul to become a curator at the Minnesota Historical Society. She has 32 years experience in museums and historical organizations.
Nancy Strickland Fields is the Education Coordinator at the American Indian Cultural Center and Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. She is a graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts Tribal College (IAIA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Museum Studies with an emphasis in museum education. While at IAIA, she worked in several key museum positions at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts. In 2006, she began working for the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in the seminars and symposia department and later in the education department as teacher services coordinator. Nancy has been honored with many awards including 2004 American Indian Higher Education Consortium Student of the Year Award by the American Indian College Fund.
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