Seminoles and Cigar Store Indians: Curricular Implications of Spatial Relations in Museums

• In Event: Roundtable Session 29
  In Roundtable Session: Race, Space, and Popular Culture

Abstract

Museums are sites inscribed with colonial ideology. The late twentieth century brought a movement within museum studies seeking to change the traditional “museum-as-temple” experience where meaning is transmitted from omniscient curator to uninformed visitor to “museum-as-forum” where meaning is considered interdependent and constructed. But how well can colonial epistemological practices be supplanted? As a white museum-goer, I use a critical and resistant postcolonial lens to evaluate the ways in which one museum, the Tampa Bay History Center, utilizes an intersecting space of multiple exhibits to construct curricula about Indigenous people of Florida. I suggest the museum inscribes a settler colonial perspective on this space, norming narratives of the “vanishing” and “tourist trade” Indian in order to legitimize white dominance.

Author

• Andrea Watson-Canning, University of South Florida