A new permanent exhibition in Chicago’s Field Museum features the history of the state’s Native Americans and reminds visitors they walk on Native land, the traditional homeland of Chicago’s original inhabitants.
The exhibition, titled “Native Truths: Our Voices, Our Stories,” includes information about Native agriculture, hip-hop music, video games, hands-on basket weaving, fine art, political history, and ecology
“Native Truths” was part of an effort from an 11-person advisory counsel to the museum. Doug Kiel, citizen of the Oneida Nation and an assistant professor of history at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, was one of several Northwestern scholars working on the new Native American exhibit.
“I would posit that most people in Chicago don’t really know where they are; not in the way that Indigenous people understand this place in deep time,” said Kiel.
Doug Kiel studies Native American history, with particular interests in the Great Lakes region and twentieth-century Indigenous nation rebuilding. Beyond the university, Kiel has worked in several museums, testified as an expert witness concerning Indigenous land rights, and in 2008 was an Indigenous Fellow at the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Geneva, Switzerland. He currently serves on the advisory committee for the renovation of the Field Museum’s exhibition on Native North America.
Learn more in Northwestern Now’s article, “‘We speak for ourselves.’”
View the video below about the new exhibition: Northwestern scholars help launch new exhibition at Chicago’s Field Museum to amplify the diverse voices of Native American people. “Native Truths: Our Voices, Our Stories” welcomes, teaches and reminds visitors they walk on native land, the traditional homeland of Chicago’s original inhabitants — the people of the Council of the Three Fires, Ojibwe, Potawatomi and Odawa as well as the Menominee, Miami and Ho-Chunk nations.