Listening to Indigenous Voices with Curator Meranda Roberts (Paiute)

Reimagining Museums with Indigenous Voices
On March 17, 2023, Dr. Meranda Roberts (Indigenous curator, researcher, and advocate) will visit the Columbia College Chicago campus to give a public talk (12:30 pm) and lead a special museum tour (2:00 pm) for Rethinking Museums with students.




Dr. Meranda Roberts is an enrolled member of the Yerington Paiute Tribe in Nevada, as well as Chicana. In 2018, she earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside in Native American History. In her talk, she will present her scholarly and curatorial work on critically engaging with museums for harmful narratives they have created about Indigenous people. She will then share her thoughts on re-presenting Indigenous artworks highlighting her recent collaborative work at the Field Museum of Natural History and the award-winning podcast Exhibiting Kinship, co-hosted with Felicia Garcia. In the Q/A portion, Dr. Roberts will have a conversation with Dr. Onur ├ûztürk (Assistant Professor of Art History) and the participants about decolonizing strategies in curatorial practice and the importance of collaborating with local communities.


In the second portion of her visit, Dr. Roberts will meet with Creative Communities: Rethinking Museums students at the Field Museum's recently renovated Native American exhibition hall, now titled Native Truths: Our Voices, Our Stories. As she discusses curatorial and community engagement strategies, students will be asked to reimagine other galleries of Chicago-area encyclopedic museums.

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