The Penn Museum presents the Native North America Gallery

The gallery, which opened in November 2025, presents items from Penn’s collections from the perspective of those who created and first used them. It explains not just what objects are, but their cultural significance, and in a few instances, dissects the controversy behind their provenance.

Interactive elements enable visitors to try Lingít and Cherokee-style weaving, to virtually examine century-old blackware pottery from New Mexico’s San Ildefonso Pueblo, and to trace the dramatic movement of Native groups as they were forced onto ever smaller lands by European and American settlers. Videos and listening stations introduce contemporary tribal members as they describe what Native heritage and tradition looks like in the 21st century.

New perspectives on curation

Eight consulting curators, including archaeologists, historians, educators, and artists, collaborated with American section associate curator-in-charge Lucy Fowler Williams, associate curator Megan C. Kassabaum, and staff across Penn Museum to develop content and presentation.

The exploration is deep rather than broad: Representative groups were chosen for each of four geographic regions: the Lingít and Alutiiq in the northwest; Puebloan peoples in the southwest; Cherokee and Muscogee in the southeast; and Lenape in the northeast. “In choosing case studies, we aim to demonstrate the vast range of environments in which Native peoples thrive while also highlighting places from which we have strong collections and current curatorial expertise,” Kassabaum and Williams said, writing in the museum magazine Expedition.

Encircling the gallery, four picture window-sized screens silently stream natural vistas from each region. At its heart, the gallery considers painful common themes, things experienced in varying degrees by all Native North American groups, 574 of which are recognized by the United States government.

Confronting the elephant in the gallery

The historically unequal, frequently unethical relationship between exhibiting institutions and Native peoples is addressed frankly. Transformation occurred in 1990 with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which acknowledged past practices and provided a means of redress. Native communities could now petition for the return of human remains, sacred items, and cultural objects.

Kassabaum and Williams write, “Our repatriation staff has worked vigorously to accurately inventory and research our collections, and to inform, consult, and cooperate with tribes about the items in our care.” Penn Museum has completed more than 50 repatriations under NAGPRA. The process is ongoing, a point made clear upon entering the gallery, where a display contains a sign reading “Not on view”, referring to the removal from exhibition of artifacts taken without permission.

NAGPRA’s impact is also apparent in a photograph of Lenape members on the banks of the Delaware River in 2022, marking the reinterment of remains excavated early in the 20th century. Consulting curator and cultural education director for the Delaware Tribe of Indians, Jeremy Johnson commented that the Lenape had had to create a reburial ceremony; they’d never needed one before this event.

The beneficial tension NAGPRA injects into Indigenous-institutional relationships, and the complexities of holding items acquired in a time of very different sensibilities, is on display in the Southeast portion of the gallery. Sitting with beautifully carved bowls, utensils, game pieces, and a bird trap from the Will West Long collection, acquired in the first half of the 20th century by Frank Speck (1881-1950), is a notice about absent items, pieces subject to ongoing discussion between the Eastern Band of the Cherokee and Penn: “While previous collaborations resulted in the respectful return of ancestors in 2013 and 2018, the Museum has so far declined to return many of the items now under claim.”

Long (1869-1947), a Cherokee, devoted his life to preserving Cherokee culture, and worked with numerous anthropologists, among them Speck, a Penn archaeologist who studied Native peoples in the eastern United States and Canada. Speck collected and commissioned Cherokee items, including some made by Long, a gifted carver. In all, Speck brought almost 300 items into Penn’s collection.

Further on appears this blunt admission: “Today we recognize that the power imbalances of such relationships [between Native communities and academic collectors] at that time may mean that some of these items should never have left the community.”

Speaking for themselves

Native language is seen and heard throughout the gallery. Labels use Indigenous names and their translations. Videos include a Lenape woman relating a legend about a squirrel. Dual subtitles allow viewers to see Lenape as they hear it, and to compare it with English.

Elsewhere, X’unei Lance Twitchell, a University of Alaska Southeast professor, describes his work recording Lingít elders. He laments that of 25,000 living tribal members, just 50 speak Lingít.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Native children were taken from their families and sent to boarding schools where they received harsh treatment designed to eradicate their Native identity. Pennsylvania’s infamous Carlisle Indian Industrial School became the model for more than 500 schools across the United States and Canada. Hundreds of children died in these schools, and many families never knew what happened. Efforts to make amends for this disgraceful legacy continue.

Despite the determination of invaders bent on subjugating them, stealing their lands, and eradicating their heritage, Native North Americans adapted and survived. Today, the US government recognizes 574 Native groups, whose members include Delaware Tribe descendant Holly Wilson, whose sculpture I Am More Than Fluff (2022), is on view. Of it, she wrote, “I am more than the view that my people are frozen in time, lost to a romanticized ideal of who the Native Americans were, we are more, and we are still here. I am not this fluff; I am loud and larger than life.”