Events

This event explores socio-environmental imagination as resistance to the advance of neo-extractivist policies. Featuring artists and environmental justice activists working in North and Latin America, including Steve Lyons, Research Director at The Natural History Museum.

NHM Storytelling Fellow Ruth Miller (Łchavaya K’isen) will talk about a powerful visual narrative project we are developing. United by resistance to development projects that threaten cultural preservation and subsistence food systems, the Yupik, Alutiiq and Dena’ina peoples of Bristol Bay, the Lummi Nation, the Yurok Tribe and the Nez Perce Tribe enter into a regional dialogue through a digital storytelling initiative that unsettles Western conceptions of land, food, and object-hood.

On connecting movements to museums, and museums to movements—leveraging institutional power to support a growing coalition of museum workers, scientists, and frontline communities.

This study day seeks to explore how we might create critical visitorship tools and technologies that animate the museum’s “shadow archive”. The problem is rarely that “there’s nothing about X topic” – but rather how the museum frames its collections, what the visitor’s gaze is directed to, and what is thus seeable. How can we activate, teach, support, and assess critical visitor-ship that reveals hidden stories present in museums?

Representatives from the Lummi and their partner The Natural History Museum will share videos, visuals, and stories of how their recent collaborations came together, and how they are part of a larger effort to transform museums—which are highly trusted, widely visited, and a $50 billion industry—into champions for environmental progress and science for the public good.