Discussions about the dioramas have been going on for years. The Exhibit Museum made the difficult decision to take the dioramas off public display after much consideration and input from many different people.

Read the comments below to see how widely varied people’s views on the dioramas are.  Or listen to Museum Director Amy Harris discuss the issues by viewing this video <http://www.ns.umich.edu/podcast/video.php?id=1162>.  Some agree with the Museum’s action, others do not. The range of opinions reveals that this is not a simple matter.

Do you have something you’d like to say? Send us an email using the form below and contribute your ideas.  We will periodically update this page with a selection of submitted comments.

“I like the dioramas because you can see new things that are different from what you’ve already seen. Native American people used different things than we do. They had different houses and foods, probably because they couldn’t find as many things as we have and maybe because they couldn’t pay for them.”

— Liam Coolican, Third Grader, Bach Elementary, Ann Arbor

“These dioramas are one of the only museum displays in southeastern Michigan where visitors can learn about the diversity of Native communities that live in North America. The dioramas are also an important medium for helping visitors conceptualize objects in a cultural context.”

- Lisa C. Young, Anthropological archaeologist, U-M Museum of Anthropology

"When my twin daughters had their dinosaur-themed birthday party at the museum, the children happened to pass by the dioramas. One pre-school classmate turned to my girls and said: "Those are Indians. They were bad!" We had brought our daughters to the museum to celebrate their birthday, but they left with an ugly racial stereotype that worked to constrain their place in the world."

- Joseph Gone, Enrolled member of the Gros Ventre nation, Ft. Belknap, Montana,
Assistant Professor of Psychology, Native American Studies, and American Culture

“Part of the metanarrative here derives from the context in which the dioramas are presented. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with them—indeed, one sees dioramas of Native Americans in many settings, including tribal museums. We are confronted with an archaic notion of civilization in which peoples seen as having no history are included in the natural history of the world. This is wrong, this is why the dioramas don’t work in the Exhibit Museum of Natural History.”

- Raymond Silverman, Director, U-M Museum Studies Program

"Our fourth grade students visit the Natural History Museum every year. My co-teacher and I talk with our students about each of the Native dioramas and make connections to our study of regional American folklore.

It saddens me greatly that we would not have these dioramas anymore. [We cannot take our students back into time to experience first hand the life of our country's natives; however,] the dioramas offer a wonderful visual aid for the learning process."

— Ann Brill, Fourth Grade Teacher, Wylie Elementary, Dexter

“The first time I saw the dioramas, I looked around for the hidden camera. No way were these naked Indians taken seriously, right? I waited for someone to come around the corner with a prize. As people have asked that these offensive images be removed, supporters dug their heels in. Why? It’s all about power. "

- Kelly Fayard, Poarch Band of Creek Indians,
U-M Doctoral Student in Anthropology, Certificate in Museum Studies

“Given rampant misperceptions in society, the dioramas only perpetuate stereotypes. I was at the museum once when a child asked her mother, “Why are they all naked, Mommy?” The mother replied, “That’s just their culture, honey.” Native people are alive, contemporary and sophisticated; having these dioramas places us in the past with dinosaurs and woolly mammoths.”

- Nickole Fox, Cherokee/Blackfoot, U-M alumna

“As a child I was lucky to grow up visiting my father, Robert Butsch, and watching him work. It was fascinating to see his tiny creations take shape and to hear him discuss the factual information on which the dioramas were based. It came down to “What did they do, and how did they do it.”

- Elizabeth Butsch Cardinal, Daughter of Dr. Robert S. Butsch, East Lansing

“Aabdeg wii ji kendoodwa ge Anishinaabeg wii kendamadwa genwa ezhi bimaadziwaad miinwaa genwa ezhi aaywaad bimaadziwaad maamwe kina miinwaa wii nsostadwa genwa ekidowaad Anishinaabemwaad.”

“To learn about the Anishinaabe people it is necessary to know the way they live and they way they live together with all things, and they way they can be understood by what is said when they use the Anishinaabe language.”

— Howard Kimewon and Margaret Noori, U-M Ojibwe Language Instructors

"These displays put forward an idea of indigenous peoples as historical subject rather than living cultures. Exhibits such as these are only a small part of a vast wave of imperialist nostalgia through which the First Nations continue to endure. Removing these dioramas is a step towards justice for human rights."

-Josh Voss, Co-Chair, Native American Student Assocation, Class of 2010

“In a museum renowned for dead things, showing the history of living cultures means asking the audience to shift their thinking. The dioramas set out to show Native American history when they were installed, but as time passed and museum methodology evolved, they became more of a liability than an asset to the museum’s goals.”

- Amanda Paige, Student Docent, U-M Exhibit Museum of Natural History

“When I look at the dioramas I feel insulted. They don’t show the way the people were as human beings—how they related with one another. When I think of Indians, I think of my family not these naked little dolls.”

- Tyler Barron, Bay Mills Ojibwe, Ann Arbor Pioneer High School Student

“It saddens me, that all these years, children are taught that Natives run around half-naked in the winter. Strange when you think of it, it was because of the Natives’ knowledge and kindness that the forefathers even survived a winter. I am happy that the Museum of Natural History is removing them as it shows a willingness to accept a different way of life.”

- Andrea Pierce, Little Traverse Bay Band of Odawa Indians and Seneca
Former Vice President of North American Indian Assoc. of Detroit
Member of Michigan Coalition Against Racism in Sports and Media

“The museum’s Native American dioramas promote a strong sense of ambivalence for me. On an aesthetic level, their beauty and craftsmanship are undeniable. On a deeper level, however, their underlying messages of “pastness,” whether intentional or not, are problematic in terms of both content and morality. It is because of their erasure of colonialism and its ongoing impacts that they can and should be renovated.

- Chris Berk, U-M doctoral student in Sociocultural Anthropology,
Graduate Student Instructor for Anthropology 101,
and Native Peoples of North America

“All of my Native friends on campus were really upset by the dioramas. That's how I heard about them. I thought, "Why would I go there and make myself angry? So I never did."

-Alys Alley, Pokagon Potawatomi and co-chair of the U-M Native American Student Association

“Why would I go into a natural history museum and look at that?”

-Fred Harrington,
Odawa Institute president and former tribal councilman of
Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians

“The dioramas say more about the “scientists” who made them than the Indians they supposedly symbolize. Who or what are these Indian dioramas supposed to signify? What do Native children think when they see themselves represented by ridiculous tiny plastic dolls in a glass case that are nothing like themselves?”

–Chris Finley, PhD candidate
Program in American Culture and Colville Confederated Tribal member

“You, too, can come to understand why these precision scenes traumatically polarize our citizenry. Look. Think. Is part the god-like thrill of gazing down to activate unsuspecting Indians to our will? Beware the seductive nectar of arrogance. Speaking for myself, I conjecture what the depicted people were doing before this moment, and have no clue as to what comes next – thus everything I image is my own fantasy rather than the bridge of respectful understanding. Am I even supposed to be watching? If dioramas are essential to anthropological teaching and knowledge, where are other cultures, including mine? Yours? Why end here? I seek answers beyond space and budget – space and budget were found for these.”

- Dr. David C. Michener, Associate Curator, UM Matthaei Botanical Gardens & Nichols Arboretum,
Museum Studies Program Steering Committee, American of mixed European heritage

“I’ve spent 40 years, in classrooms and museum galleries, breaking people of their passion for the Indians they love. . . all the stuffed Indians in museums, forever making pots and hunting buffalo, movie Indians attacking the wagon train, and the one little, two little Indians in the kiddie books. Parents and teachers come into the museum, wanting to show the kids those old Indians in all their evocative power. But new words on a label won’t counteract those powerful images. We’ve got to give them corrected Indians, new Indians, different Indians, surprising Indians. . .the grandmas who still weave, but who take Master Card for their weaving, the men who still fish, upholding their fishing rights in court. Just as we now replace those male lions in hunting mode with the female lions who actually get dinner for the cubs, we’ve got to replace those weary warriors and weavers–in our heads and in our hearts–with the grown-up versions.”

- Rayna Green (Cherokee), Curator, National Museum of American History

“Why are Indians in a museum about extinct animals and nature? The creation of museums, anthropology and the annihilation of tribal peoples all occurred simultaneously during the rise of American Empire after the Civil War. We can no longer pretend such a context does not matter. Quite the opposite is true, which is why mini Indians in terrariums no longer meet baseline museum standards.
I asked the man who created these dioramas what he would say to Indians who criticized them. He responded, “We won, and if you don’t like it, you can go to hell.” Dr. Butsch never consulted a single Indian when making these cases, a common practice in his day.
When I look through this glass, I don’t see “scientific” neutrality nor authority. I see an ugly colonial fantasy, one where Indian people are contained with the animals, classified by their colonizers, kept in the past, and completely silenced. Well you know what? They wish. We are here, we are educated, and you must deal with us now.”

- Veronica Pasfield, Bay Mills Ojibwe
U-M doctoral student in the Program in American Culture

“It's not the diorama format itself that's troubling, it's that the scenes limit the museum visitor's learning opportunity. These dioramas only portray our people as they lived half a millenium ago without allowing visitors to see the difficult struggles and hard-won triumphs that Native people experienced in the last 600 years. The sense of change and movement are missing—how did we come to be the Anishinabek that live in Michigan today? What happened to the great-great grandchildren of those shown in the diorama displays? We are still here—we pray using the same words and language; we drum, sing and dance to celebrate the births of our children; we remember the teachings of our ancestors—but we also look forward to the future.
“A young museum visitor seeing these diorama displays will miss out on learning about all of that. They will take home a clear vision in their mind of Native people—one that may stay with them for years to come. But, unfortunately, that is a picture that is 600 years old without a view for the lasting beauty of contemporary Native cultures—the exciting, vibrant lives of our peoples today. And that young visitor will have no sense of how we changed from the Anishinabek of 500 years ago who lived in wigwams and stone-boiled our food to the Anishinabek of today who are judges, lawyers, professors, artists...living all over the globe. We are so proud of our past and our present, and of sharing our culture with generations yet to be born—but that is all lost in these dioramas, where we are stuck in the past.
“Being thought of as 'stuck in the past' is something Native people have to deal with all the time in our daily lives. When I travel to Turkey to do research, people are always so surprised to meet a Native American. "I thought you were all dead," they say. Or, "Did they make you wear your American clothes to travel on the plane to come here instead of your leather and feathers?" And these are serious questions that I have to answer. Sometimes I laugh as think what their reaction might be to seeing the Ziibiwing cultural center on the Saginaw Chippewa reservation—a beautiful, award winning museum that people in Turkey would love to have in their own community. They are surprised, and seem impressed when I tell them about the ways that Anishinabek people strive to keep our language from dying, and our teachings alive for our grandchildren. I think visitors to the UM natural history museum would also be surprised and happy to learn about that sort of contemporary Indian lifestyle—where we are no longer portrayed as being forever living in the 1400's.”

- Sonya Atalay, Anishinaabe-kwe
Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Indiana University