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Americans trust museums. Continuous studies from the American Alliance of Museums assert this, a 2025 Pew Research Center report affirms it, and reputable news organizations report it. Yet there’s no shortage of jeremiads proclaiming that museums are in need of reform. Despite the calls to transform them, 92% of American “adults view museums as nonpartisan sources of education,” 96% “say they would support lawmakers who fund museums,” and 97% “see museums as vital educational assets to their communities.” Those intersections between museums and education offer fruitful junctions for students of history to explore. In my own courses, I require that students visit local museums to examine their messages and consider what they may have overlooked. While some may see an assignment that speculates how to broaden the stories shared at public sites as an exercise in diversity, equity, and inclusion, the reality is that minority people have always been integral to the American museum story. Recent texts collectively show that education, curation, and public exhibition have always walked hand-in-hand, and recognizing this truth can help students better understand the foundations that built the museums that Americans love.
Museums point visitors to under told stories, including those about how educational norms created American societies. No book better captures the problematic history of America’s Black and Native education than Jarvis R. Givens’ American Grammar: Race, Education, and the Building of a Nation. Eschewing previous scholars’ assertion that American minority education is a story of “exclusion,” Givens convincingly asserts it’s one of “domination.” This framework resituates boarding schools and segregated schools as institutions that perpetuated the racial dynamics which withheld opportunity from their pupils, while white students who were educated elsewhere were uplifted. Givens quotes late 19th-century education leaders including Merrill Gates who sought “to conquer the Indians by a standing-army of school-teachers,” on route to showing how those efforts more often than not led to generational trauma rather than the desired assimilation into American society. Givens honors the exceptions who rose above the conquest, such as Yankton Dakota reformer Zitkala-Ša and Black community leader Booker T. Washington, showing how their best efforts were met by dominant societal pushback. Favoring honest assessment over an optimistic reimagining, Givens reveals that the story of American education needs to be retaught.
American museums’ collections have benefited from Indian boarding school graduates, and Nathan Sowry offers the most complete examination of their efforts. Turning the Power: Indian Boarding Schools, Native American Anthropologists, and the Race to Preserve Indigenous Cultures examines how boarding school graduates became “cultural informants” who helped museums procure the collections of their people. Sowry illuminates the too often overlooked fact that the salvage anthropology that sought to document “vanishing” Native people and “resulted in the confiscation of massive amounts of cultural heritage” actually preserved those artifacts for future Native descendants to reclaim. Taking its title from the vernacular of boarding school survivors who used their education to better the lives of their people, Sowry asserts that the Native people who assisted in the collecting of cultural items wielded their influence to shape the collections. Sowry chronicles the lives of 10 Native anthropologists, situating them in the historical records which theretofore had minimalized their contributions. In so doing, Sowry lends humanity and even nobility to work that is typically villainized. Sowry’s text complicates reductive narratives about Native people and their relationship with academia and museum studies, casting ancestors in roles beyond victims and co-conspirators.
Educated curators exponentially increase a museum’s value, and this month witnessed the announcement that one of the Smithsonian Institution’s most influential leaders will retire at the end of this year. Lonnie G. Bunch III was the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture before being promoted to the Secretary of the Smithsonian in 2019, overseeing 21 museums, the National Zoo, and various research libraries and centers. Bunch was the first historian to lead the venerated national institution, helping to usher in more complete narratives into the American consciousness. Yet those who sought to detract from his inclusive approach to our nation’s history painted Bunch as an activist with an agenda. While it’s hardly surprising that the man who has been forced to repeatedly publicly defend his leadership and the work of his colleagues is retiring after a long and storied career, what is surprising is that no one can point to any actual flaws in the conclusions the Smithsonian presented while under his helm. In short, his detractors shot at the messenger, and there’s little wonder Bunch is unwilling to be used as target practice.
Educators must always be thinking about the next generation of museum leadership. There’s too much at stake for a society to become historically illiterate. We learn from the past, and Americans are trusting museums to be their teachers. The next generation of museum leaders is sitting in college classrooms right now, and they’re counting on their education to give them the foundation they need to make a difference. Before they can affect the way the past is taught, we must ensure that they recognize that our collective story is complicated, all of our ancestors contributed to it, and it’s best told in an inclusive manner that honors all whose efforts made the United States what it is today. Museums are vital sources for public education, but they’re only as trustworthy as we, the people, make them.
Ryan Winn, PhD, teaches in the Liberal Studies Department at College of Menominee Nation.
Editor’s note: The opinions expressed in the Inquisitive Academic or any other opinion columns published by the Tribal College Journal (TCJ) do not necessarily reflect the opinions of TCJ or the American Indian Higher Education Consortium.
References
Ackmon, D. (2026, January 6). How Museums Can Help Build Trust in a Divided America. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ripple/2026/01/05/how-museums-can-help-rebuild-trust-in-a-divided-america/
American Alliance of Museums. (2021, September 30). Museums and Trust 2021. https://www.aam-us.org/2021/09/30/museums-and-trust-2021/
Givens, J.R. (2025). American Grammar: Race, Education, and the Building of a Nation. HarperCollins.
Pew Research Center. (2025, May 8). Americans’ Trust in One Another. https://www.pewresearch.org/2025/05/08/americans-trust-in-one-another/
Pogrebin, R., & Bowley G. (2026 September 8). Smithsonian’s Secretary to Resign as Trump Tries to Rule the Institution. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/08/arts/design/smithsonian-secretary-lonnie-bunch-resigns.html
Sowry, N. (2025). Turning the Power: Indian Boarding Schools, Native American Anthropologists, and the Race to Preserve Indigenous Cultures. University of Nebraska Press.
