Going Home: Repatriation, Contemporary Art, and Indigiqueer Futures in Museums

This dissertation explores the use of Indigenous and queer critique within the space of the museum, primarily taking up two sites of inquiry: the McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and the Museum of the Cherokee People in Cherokee, North Carolina while also considering other relevant museum spaces. Using the lenses of both collections subject to NAGPRA (the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) and contemporary, Indigenous art collections, this dissertation explores the different ways that through efforts of Indigenization, the space of the museum might be understood as a home. Relying on ethnographic data collected over the course of almost seven years, this dissertation thinks through museum practices of curation, exhibition, and collection with the political claims of both queer theory and Indigenous ways of knowing/Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS). Considering the topics of space, place, possession, communal belonging, embodiment, and futurity, this dissertation draws on a wide, interdisciplinary breadth of theoretical thought in order to make contributions to the fields of cultural anthropology/archaeology, art history, queer studies, NAIS, and museum studies.