Spirited Encounters - by Karen Coody Cooper (Paperback)

About the Book

During the twentieth century, American Indians across North America organized protests against traditional museum treatment of Native materials and the Native community. In response, museums began to change their methods. Spirited Encounters provides a foundation for understan...

Book Synopsis

During the twentieth century, American Indians across North America organized protests against traditional museum treatment of Native materials and the Native community. In response, museums began to change their methods. Spirited Encounters provides a foundation for understanding museums, examines how museums collect Native materials, and explores protest as a fully American process of addressing grievances. Now that museums and American Indians are working together in the processes of repatriation, this book can help each side understand the other more fully.

Review Quotes

A straightforward account that touches on the major issues confronting museums in any multicultural society. Appropriate for anyone interested in cultural heritage issues. Highly recommended.

This monograph raises significant questions and reveals numerous debates surrounding such issues as ownership and access to museum collections and archives; the repatriation of human remains, funerary items, and cultural patrimony; Native American traditional and modern art and art museums; the need for consultation and collarboration with Indigenous peoples and communities;and the importance of sacred sites.

About the Author

Karen Coody Cooper was recently the Museum Training Program Coordinator at the National Museum of the American Indian, and was formerly Training Programs Manager at the Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies. She holds a Master of Liberal Studies degree, with a museum and anthropology emphasis, from the University of Oklahoma and is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.