WA History Museum to open new exhibit about Native land

The Washington State History Museum is opening a new exhibit co-created by a Native nonprofit and UWT professor in the coming months.

By: Michaela Ely

“This Is Native Land” is a new exhibit coming to the Washington State History Museum this summer. This exhibit was co-curated by UWT professor and member of the Puyallup Tribe, Dr. Danica Sterud Miller, and Todd Clark, a member of the Wailaki Tribe in Northern California. Clark is also the founder and curator of IMDMN, a nonprofit organization that advocates for contemporary native art and artists. 

The construction of “This Is Native Land” is expected to be finished by summer of this year, with the exhibit opening soon after, though it has been a three-year process. The museum has had a few closures due to the installation of some of the bigger pieces of the exhibit but is now moving into the contained construction phase. 

“I’ve been responsible for sort of creating and implementing the larger theme, which is something like, we are here. We have always been here, and we always will be here, which for a lot of us seems pretty logical,” Dr. Sterud Miller said. 

This exhibit examines events in Washington history through an Indigenous lens, exploring concepts such as Indigenous sovereignty and resilience to critically examine the experience of those in this state. This experience has been informed by challenges such as boarding schools, removal from land and assimilation throughout history. 

“A lot of my work is in Indigenous sovereignty, so I really do support and create a lot of the sovereignty exhibits, and what that looks like. My co-curator, Todd Clark, is a native art curator, and so one of the very unusual things that you’ll see in our history museum is that there will be a ton of Native art, which is really exciting,” Dr. Miller said. 

The exhibition will not exclusively be focused on the past, as it aims to examine Indigenous futures, especially through some of the artwork presented.

This exhibition will be a permanent installation in the Great Hall area of the museum, replacing a series of reproduction sets that will be integrated elsewhere. These sets include the plank house, pioneer town, train cars and shingle mill, which all heavily featured non-historical props, according to the Washington State Historical Society website. 

“It should be [evolving], there’s a lot of media in there that hopefully can be replaced or added to every five or so years. One of the things we knew immediately is that we didn’t want to tell a story. We wanted a lot of stories to be told. So, there’s a lot of different spaces where Native elders or youth are telling their stories,” Dr. Miller said. 

This exhibit will also provide information about treaty rights in the state, why they are significant and how they are upheld by the federal government and the U.S. Constitution. 

“We look at different ways that we have advocated for ourselves and our sovereignty. So, everything from environmental rights, in terms of ways we have protected our children, to something more well known such as the Fish Wars,” Dr. Miller said. 

The Fish Wars were a series of protests in the 1960s and 1970s by Native American tribes in the Pacific Northwest to advocate for their fishing rights promised by the Treaty of Medicine Creek. These fishing rights were later affirmed by a Washington court ruling by Judge George Hugo Boldt in 1974 and reaffirmed by a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1979. 

The lens of Indigenous sovereignty used in this exhibit aims for a greater understanding of Native history in Washington. To learn more and find updates on partial museum closures and construction, information can be found at the Washington State Historical Society website.