Indigenous scholar speaks about museum collections

Can Indigenous artists, curators, and historians resist the colonial narrative of art museums when the museum itself is a colonizer institution?

Vera Keller, professor of History, has been researching the origins of UO’s Ada B. Millican Collection. This collection, alongside the Thomas Condon Collection and the Murray Warner Collection of Oriental Art, was among the first public collections at UO. It includes almost 400 Native belongings that Millican (1858–1927) collected during her six-year career working in U.S. Indian boarding schools in Utah, Arizona, and Washington. Keller’s research has uncovered an important and tragic history that connects UO’s collections with the boarding school experience, especially with schools in Arizona where Millican spent over three years. 

According to Keller, “It is critical that this history be restored to the Southwest Native Nations and that our campus investigate its historical collecting strategies.” She has invited David Martínez (Akimel O’odham/Hia-Ced O’odham/Mexican), professor of American Indian Studies and Transborder Studies at Arizona State University, to campus for a public talk and a visit to Keller’s History of Museums class. 

Reflecting on his own experience visiting the museum on the Gila River Indian Community, David Martínez argues that the path to resistance lay in the land itself in his public talk “There Is No Word for Museum in My Language: An O’odham View of the Art World” on Thursday, November 6, 2025 at 10 a.m. at the Museum of Natural and Cultural History. 

Professor Martínez is a leading scholar on the Akimel O’odham and collecting. He has frequently worked with museums such as the Heard Museum. He is the author of the forthcoming The Maze of History: Komal Hok, O’odham Teachings, and an Earth-Based Sense of Time (University of New Mexico Press, April 2026). Martínez is also the author of My Heart Is Bound Up with Them: How Carlos Montezuma Became the Voice of a Generation (2023), Life of the Indigenous Mind: Vine Deloria Jr. and the Birth of the Red Power Movement (2019), and Dakota Philosopher: Charles Eastman and American Indian Thought (2009). 

Keller shares, “In the course of my research, I have been very impressed with Professor Martínez’s body of work. He is the ideal person to investigate our collection. He is extremely interested in it and has volunteered to advise us on a future exhibition of UO’s O’odham baskets.” 

Martínez’s talk is included with admission to the Museum of Natural and Cultural History, which is free for UO ID holders. This event is presented by History, Native American and Indigenous Studies, the Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies, and the OHC’s Endowment for Public Outreach in the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities. For more information visit mnch.uoregon.edu