Beginning with Land: Decolonizing Museum Environments

ID: WMA2026_645

Track:

Indigenous communities do not conceptualize knowledge, story, or experience as confined within museum walls. Land, movement, arrival, and narrative are interconnected and inseparable. Yet many museums remain grounded in a Western model that centers the building as object. This session explores how Indigenous-led approaches can support the decolonization of museum environments, using project precedents and academic research to share strategies for rethinking arrival, orientation, and site in both new and existing institutions, ultimately supporting more meaningful and culturally grounded visitor experiences.

Session Information

Format: Regular session/panel (roundtable, single speaker, etc.)

Uniqueness: Connects Indigenous-led frameworks with museum design, showing how land-based, relational approaches can decolonize environments and create more meaningful, culturally grounded visitor experiences.

Objectives:

Session Objectives

• Examine how Indigenous frameworks, grounded in land, relationship, and cultural knowledge, challenge dominant museum models that center the building as object, while affirming Indigenous presence, sovereignty, and living culture.
• Analyze how these frameworks are translated into practice through project precedents, primarily Indigenous museums, with attention to process, collaboration, and storytelling shaped by Indigenous leadership and voice, including co-design across building, exhibit, and community partners.
• Explore how these approaches can be applied across museum contexts, including non-Native-led institutions, where meaningful engagement with Indigenous communities can strengthen connections to land, narrative, and visitor experience in both new and existing environments. Potential Outcomes
• A deeper understanding of how museum environments can shift beyond representation to reflect land, community, and cultural continuity.
• Greater clarity around how Indigenous engagement can inform both new projects and incremental changes to existing museums.
• Practical and conceptual strategies for strengthening relationships to land, community, and narrative, supporting more meaningful, place-based, relational, and culturally grounded visitor experiences.

Engagement: This session will be structured as a moderated panel combining case-based presentations with critical inquiry. Presenters will situate their work within broader decolonizing frameworks, drawing on project precedents and relevant scholarship to examine how Indigenous methodologies reshape museum environments. A moderator will guide the discussion through a series of questions focused on process, authorship, and institutional change. The session will conclude with an open Q&A, inviting audience reflection and dialogue across diverse institutional contexts.

Relationship to Theme:

Audience

Audiences: Curators/Scientists/Historians Development and Membership Officers Marketing & Communications (Including Social Media) Registrars, Collections Managers 

Professional Level: All levels 

Scalability: The session focuses on approaches that recognize knowledge, story, and experience as extending beyond museum walls, and how this perspective can inform a range of institutional contexts. By centering Indigenous frameworks and engaging communities as collaborators, organizations can reimagine how place, narrative, and sensory experience shape meaning and visitor engagement. These strategies expand interpretation into the broader context of place, and can be implemented through targeted interventions or more fully realized in capital projects.

Participants