1. Listening for descendants’ voices in museums

Because of museums’ historic role in cultural destruction and “symbolic annihilation,” a term Jennifer L. Eichstedt and Stephen Small use to describe the complete erasure of Black life at historic sites, many Black and Indigenous people have kept their distance from such institutions.Footnote ⁸ That people of color would have little interest in visiting—let alone working with—institutions responsible for harming their families is understandable. Yet more and more heritage sites are engaging with descendants; contact has been initiated both by museums and by descendants themselves.Footnote ⁹

Change in interpretation of Black and Indigenous history is uneven across the country. At plantation homes in the Southeast, stories about enslaved workers now typically supplement tours of White plantation owners’ homes, but input from descendants of the enslaved is not commonly sought. The focus of most plantation home tours remains the White family.Footnote ¹⁰ Significant progress has been made at some historic plantation sites, such as Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and James Madison’s Montpelier in Virginia, and, more recently, Shadows-on-the-Teche in New Iberia, Louisiana.Footnote ¹¹

Native Americans are beginning to reimagine their relationships with museums as well. While some scholars remain skeptical of an implicit power imbalance, evidence of mutually satisfying partnerships based on “reciprocal schemes of authority and power” is emerging.Footnote ¹² The First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City has a curatorial team made up entirely of Indigenous people, with the idea of eliminating the colonist’s perspective in exhibits (implicit or explicit) and engendering trust among the Indigenous population in Oklahoma whose stories they tell.Footnote ¹³ A tribal elder’s comment that “the museum felt like home” was a powerful affirmation of deputy director Shoshana Wasserman’s belief that the museum design speaks to Native Oklahomans on a deep, cultural level.Footnote ¹⁴

It is clear that descendants’ voices are valued more and more by museums as they reorient interpretation and incorporate descendants into their organizations. My argument here, though, is that descendants have an overlooked value as museum visitors. When they enter a heritage site, do they feel implicit inclusion? Does the museum’s approach to storytelling resonate with the descendant? Descendant visitors’ responses to their initial encounter with a heritage site or museum can speak volumes about the museum’s effectiveness as a meaningful and relevant storyteller. Museum professionals entrusted with a family’s story hold an obligation to both descendants and the public to tell that story with as much sensitivity, texture, and honesty as they can. It matters that they listen to descendants’ responses to their work. It matters because a descendant’s family story, a thread in the fabric of the American story, has relevance to all Americans as they seek to understand how their country became what it is. To look more broadly at descendants’ perspectives as visitors, in the following section, I examine how two other descendants experienced visits to museums that feature or include their ancestors’ stories. The descendants have very different relationships with their respective museums, yet each has touched and been touched by the museum in significant ways.

2. Bettye Kearse at James Madison’s Montpelier in Orange, Virginia

In contrast to Aziza Frank, Bettye Kearse had significant contact with many relatives before visiting Montpelier. She had recently taken on the role of family griotte, or keeper of family stories from generations back, and was eager to build upon her family’s knowledge. A well understood piece of family history on her mother’s side was that they—African Americans—had descended from James Madison, the fourth president of the United States. Bettye had a box of heirlooms and documents, but no ancestor had published a book of family history as Josiah Henson had. Bettye was going to take on that task. The Californian knew her first step had to be visiting James Madison’s home in Virginia to touch the land her ancestors tilled and to confront the violence—including rape—they endured.Footnote ¹⁵

Bettye’s first visit to Montpelier was in June 1992. “The moment I set foot on the soil where my ancestors had walked some two hundred years earlier,” she writes, “I felt that I belonged there with them, that they, with this place, would help me become the griotte I wanted to be.”Footnote ¹⁶ She pursued relationships with Montpelier archaeologists and historians who were eager to assist her, although not everyone in central Virginia liked the idea of a Black woman investigating her family’s history of enslavement at Montpelier.Footnote ¹⁷ Bettye sometimes winced at decisions the archaeologists made, such as turning a dirt path enslaved cooks had used into a brick walkway. Bettye had seen the dirt path as a tangible connection to her ancestor Corinne, who had cooked for the Madisons.Footnote ¹⁸ But Bettye persisted, and her book The Other Madisons: The Lost History of a President’s Black Family was published in 2021. In the intervening years, she helped form the Montpelier Descendants Committee and is featured in Montpelier’s award-winning exhibit The Mere Distinction of Colour about the lives and legacy of enslaved workers on Madison’s plantation.Footnote ¹⁹ Bettye ultimately responded to Montpelier in a way that transformed the institution. She hopes her work there will help others see that “America’s enslaved people possessed remarkable inner strength and talents. These qualities did not die with them, but were passed on to their descendants, enabling us to make remarkable and important contributions to America and the world.”Footnote ²⁰ Through encounters with her enslaved ancestors’ home, Bettye Kearse has inspired African Americans, imagining new ways to confront what Saidiya Hartman calls “the afterlife of slavery.”Footnote ²¹

3. Edward Red Eagle, Jr. at First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

First Americans Museum (FAM) is a very new museum. It opened in September 2021 as a tribute to the thirty-nine tribes that reside in Oklahoma. The museum’s architecture is based on Native American symbolism relevant to these tribes, and the curatorial team is “one hundred percent Native.”Footnote ²² Oklahoma’s Native people are meant to feel at home here. Curators further fostered this feeling through the reuniting of Native objects that had been taken from Oklahoma in the early twentieth century by museum collectors with “descendants of their users/makers and tribes.”Footnote ²³ Edward Red Eagle Jr. and his family, from the Osage Nation, were invited for a special ceremony at FAM to reunite them with an “ornately beaded man’s coat” that researchers had traced back to earlier generations of the Red Eagle family. The reunion was a joyous occasion, as “[the coat] has so many stories to tell.” Edward Red Eagle Jr. believes he knows how the coat may have been lost to his family, and that being with it again “shortens the time period between them [the ancestors who made it] and us.”Footnote ²⁴ Reconnecting with the coat allowed the relationship to be repaired, providing a reset for the family’s feeling of wholeness. This follows from Tiya Miles’s theory that “the loss of material traces of history…has grave ramifications for well-being.”Footnote ²⁵

Because the museum has adopted a “full authority” approach, meaning cultural restoration carries just as much weight as preservation and conservation, the Red Eagle family will now have input as to how the object is displayed and when it may be used.Footnote ²⁶ The object’s label will describe the function of the coat in family life, and the conditions that led to its loss. A film of the family’s reunion with the coat will also have a role in the exhibit.Footnote ²⁷ This exhibit, with its all-native curation and focus on cultural preservation, does address the trauma of colonization and create space for healing, as an increasing number of scholars believe museums that concern Indigenous peoples must do. FAM is an impressive model for addressing national wrongs and affirming Indigenous culture, and its focus on descendants such as Edward Red Eagle, Jr. plays an important role in that work. Edward Red Eagle, Jr.’s role as a guest makes his museum experience somewhat different from those of Aziza Frank and Bettye Kearse. Nonetheless, his response to the museum could be considered representative of other Osage guests who visit FAM of their own accord, as Red Eagle Jr. had no role in creating the museum’s exhibits.

4. Comparing descendant experiences

While one’s attention may initially be drawn to differences in the descendants’ museum experiences, the similarities are significant as they speak to the shift in interpretation of Black and Indigenous history at heritage museums. At FAM, the family of Edward Red Eagle Jr. was celebrated for its contributions to Native culture, just as Bettye’s and Aziza’s ancestors’ talents and resilience were (eventually, in the case of Montpelier) highlighted at their ancestors’ plantation homes. The trauma associated with his loss was presented as an American failure, as were the conditions that Bettye and Aziza’s enslaved ancestors lived in. While FAM was recently created to be a cultural home for Edward Red Eagle, Jr., historic Montpelier and Josiah Henson Museum are celebrated today as sites of Kearse’s and Frank’s—as well as America’s—Black heritage.

Different in all three cases was the feeling of connection to the museum or ancestral home that each person experienced. Although FAM is a new museum whose physical site has no historic connection to the Oklahoma tribes it represents, Edward Red Eagle Jr. felt valued there immediately. Nothing distracted from this experience. While simply walking on Montpelier’s grounds connected Bettye Kearse to her ancestors, it took time for her to create a space for herself there. And Aziza Frank was perhaps not ready to fully engage herself in the Henson Museum experience. She needed time to absorb this presentation of her ancestor.

5. Mutual distrust, full trust, and mutual education: Three models for the descendant museum experience

Descendants’ increasing involvement at heritage sites and history museums is a major evolution in the museum world. Museums that have descendant involvement undoubtedly provide richer, more authentic experiences for people of color and are more likely to meet their needs and expectations. But descendant participation in museum operations is not enough. To be fully responsive to descendant needs, and by extension more genuine for the public, a museum needs to understand how descendants feel when they walk on the museum grounds for the first time, and what they think when they see presentations of objects their ancestor saw or touched. A heritage site needs to know if descendants feel a general sense of trustworthiness in the museum. Only then can a museum say it is fully honoring the individual or individuals whose stories it is telling and can it be confident in the relevance of its exhibits.

At the many heritage sites and museums in this country, descendant visitors are certain to encounter a variety of different experiences when they enter a museum that holds the story of an ancestor. Bettye’s experience might be described as “mutual distrust,” at least initially, but fortunately her tenacity turned that around. Edward’s could be termed “full trust,” for the museum’s active role in connecting him to a lost family treasure and honoring it as he wishes. In Aziza’s case, “mutual education” might be an appropriate classification, for what both parties learned from the encounter. Relationships between historic sites and descendants are uniquely consequential. The institution has the profound responsibility of paying attention.

I contacted Aziza two months after her visit. The mutual education continued. Aziza’s realization that “the slur ‘Uncle Tom’ isn’t accurate to his story” was especially important to her. Her visit made her “feel safe that the museum is actually in the business of educating and not making a profit off of black trauma as a lot of institutions do.” I learned that Aziza was not aware of other Josiah Henson descendants until she saw the museum’s introductory video, and she would like to be connected with them. She suggested that “it would…be nice if possible to show pictures of the descendants. A lot of people think that slavery was so long ago, but it [wasn’t] and showing how we’re still here may help with that.”Footnote ²⁸

Edward Red Eagle, Jr. and Bettye Kearse also observed that having a tangible connection to the past (Edward’s coat, Bettye’s dirt path) can profoundly affect one’s feeling of closeness with those who experienced life in a bygone era. When museums listen to descendants’ reflections on their visits, storytelling gains more texture and relevance to the world we live in today. The possibility of addressing and responding to injustices (past and present) becomes real. More research on descendants’ experiences at historic sites and museums will help develop additional descendant visitor models and perhaps aid in establishing best practices for museums to follow up with descendant visitors. After decades of disrespect, erasure, and multigenerational trauma, it is time for museums to get it right. Getting history right matters, and descendants can help bring us there.