Join the Institute for Human Science and Culture for their speaker series on reducing harms in museums for a talk with Courtney Little Axe!

The University of Montana Anthropological Curation Facility (UMACF) has been working in collaboration with the Tribal Historic Preservation Officers from each Montana tribe to formulate policies and procedures in accordance with cultural protocols for repatriation. The University of Montana’s NAGPRA Repatriation Coordinator will discuss what Indigenizing collections care means and what successful collaboration between institutions and tribes could look like.

Courtney Little Axe is Northern Cheyenne, Absentee Shawnee, and Seminole. She grew up on the Northern Cheyenne reservation and in Little Axe/Tecumseh, Oklahoma. She has an AS in Natural Sciences and a Records and Information Management Certificate from Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas. She also has a BA in Anthropology and a Forensic Studies Certificate from the University of Montana (UM). During her undergrad, Courtney worked as an intern in the UM Anthropological Curation Facility for two years. Following her time at UM, she was selected as a Native American fellow at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts and worked on NAGPRA report preparation, researching tribal communities, and bringing an Indigenous perspective to museum exhibitions. She also worked for the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, California for three years assisting the NAGPRA Coordinator there. She is now the Repatriation Coordinator and Collections Manager at the University of Montana (UM). Her skill set helped create procedures to work with numerous tribes across the country to assist with cultural protocols for handling and care of cultural materials. She has dedicated much of her adult life to repatriation and Indigenizing heritage collection care with hope that her work will help rebuild the framework for what repatriation and collections care could look like.

The event is free but please register ahead of time here!

This speaker series was funded in part by an Ohio Humanities Spark Grant.

Curious about other grants? Visit our calendar or browse our list of grantees!