A Museum in a Book: Teaching Culture through Decolonizing, Arts-based Methodologies

This paper explores the positivist, museum-based, and touristic constructions of indigenous cultures in the Americas, as represented in the DK Eyewitness series, and then overturns these constructions using an artist book created by the authors. In our analysis of the nonfiction series, we identified three trajectories: cataloguing, consignment to the past, and pleasurable display. Using techniques borrowed from "new historiography" and the decolonizing methodologies of Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999), we suggest ways in which adults and young people might "speak back" to these positivist paradigms.