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Graduate Student Scarlett Engle����presented her research��at the NCAIS Graduate��Student Conference��& The Southwest Symposium.�� At the 2023 NCAIS Graduate Student Conference, she presented her paper, "Decolonizing and Indigenizing Praxis:��Collaborating with Pueblos and Tribes to Reimagine the Mesa Verde National Park Museum," and at the��Southwest Symposium in Santa Fe she presented her paper "The Power of Placemaking: Shaping the Cultural Landscape of Mesa Verde National Park."

Decolonizing and Indigenizing Praxis: Collaborating with Descendant Communities to Reimagine the Mesa Verde National Park Museum - Abstract

In 2019, Mesa Verde National Park began a collaborative re-interpretation project of a scale never before attempted by a U.S. national park. This collaboration brings together Mesa Verde National Park employees, museum professionals, archaeologists, and members of the twenty-six associated Pueblos and tribes to redesign the museum in the park. I investigate how this redesign affects the entrenched colonial relationships between parks, tribes, and anthropologists. Recently, there have been important shifts from the Department of the Interior to increase Native collaboration in individual parks. My paper asks how these steps could be considered decolonizing moves, using the dialogical process of the Mesa Verde National Park Museum redesign as a case study. Specially, my paper centers on the process of implementing Indigenous theory, decolonizing methodologies, and collaborative museology in a place-based museum. I frame this as the dual processes of decolonizing and Indigenizing praxis. In the case of the Mesa Verde National Park Museum, this entails collaboratively interpreting archaeology and centering Indigenous knowledge and connections to place. I illustrate how Indigenous knowledge and histories, viewed as what Foucault termed “subjugated knowledge,” have been devalued through the US National Park Service narrative and how this may be changing. Through integrating archaeological and Indigenous evidence to create a deeper understanding of the Pueblo past, I argue that the Mesa Verde National Park Museum project transforms the colonial relationships that have long defined encounters between Native and non-Native people.��

The Power of Placemaking: Shaping the Cultural Landscape of Mesa Verde National Park - Abstract

��In 2019, Mesa Verde National Park (MVNP) began a collaborative re-interpretation project of a scale never before attempted by a U.S. National Park. This collaboration brings together MVNP employees, archaeologists, and members of the twenty-six associated Pueblos and Tribes to redesign the Chapin Mesa Archeological Museum (CMAM). Through ethnographic research, I investigated these groups’ relationships to this important place and to the past. These communities all engage in forms of placemaking that shape our understanding and interpretation of the MVNP cultural landscape—through their connections to place and study of it, by physically building the place, and now by re-imagining the CMAM and the narrative of the park. R