The Great Plains Art Museum has selected Amy Lonetree to be a part of their 2024 speaker series: Centering Indigenous Voices in Museums.” The Museum recognizes that museums have largely preesented Eurocentric narratives and siplaced art that misrepresented or erased indigenous peoples.

Lonetree’s talk will be “Decolonizing Museums and Memorials: Reclaiming Narratives and Cetenring Indigenous Survivance.”

Lonetree, of the Ho-Chunk Nation, will give voice to the ongoing process of incorporating more indigenous artworks. lesson learned, and the challenges of reclaiming Indigenous ancestors and cultural belongings in colonial institutions.

She will also discuss the importance behind reclaiming and centering the Native voice and perspective in the interpretation in museums and memorials.

Lonetree is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies and her scholarly research focuses on 20th century Native American history, public history, visual culture studies, and museum studies. She is currently working on a book focusing on a visual history of the Ho-Chunk Nation that explores the family history, tourism, settler colonialism, and Ho-Chunk survivance.

This series is part of the “Walking in the Footsteps of our Ancestors: Re-Indigenizing Southeast Nebraska” project at the Center for Great Plains Studies, funded by the Mellon Foundation. Series events will be recorded and posted later.