Inside a Glass Box
Author: Danna Carina Cruz
My name is Danna Carina Cruz and I am a first generation Mexican American and a 7th generation Mixtecan. Growing up in California, I recall visiting a handful of museums as a child on field trips with my classmates, but never with my family. I always loved seeing the dinosaur bones at Natural History museums, but never understood why there were wax figures of people that resembled my culture alongside them. As I grew up, I began to see all of the ways minority communities in America were being discriminated against, and I knew I wanted to do something about it. As a first-generation graduate student in Museum Studies, I now work as a Bilingual Museum Interpreter where I focus on making labels more inclusive to non-english speaking visitors. I am on a mission to help educate people on why displaying indigenous objects in museums is disrespectful and detrimental to cultures like mine around the world.
You’ve probably heard of the slogan “water is life” used by natives to spread awareness about environment-related issues, and this is because Indigenous people have had a very close relationship to the Earth for generations. Water has had a huge influence in Mesoamerican cultures in places like Oaxaca, Mexico. One of the many regions is the Mixteca region, where I am from. The Mixtecs are inhabitants of this territory and we are known as “the people of the land of rain and clouds”, which translates to “Ñuu savÍ“ or “Ñuu Snuviko” in the Mixtec language. Our relationship to water and to the Earth is a very special and celebrated one.
“The landscape of communities of Nuu SavÍ is inhabited by various Nuhu (sacred beings) who are said to be in eternal existence with human beings, as the Sun, the Wind, the grandmother of the Temazcal (steam bath), the Water, the Lady of the Spring, the Corn and the Rains, among others. ”
These are not mere figments of imagination or metaphors based on legends of ancient peoples, but are living and breathing entities just as real as a person walking down the street today. This concept is difficult to grasp for a society who values evidence on the physical plane of existence above all else, but one only needs to peer into a microscope or a telescope to see that our sense of reality is being challenged all the time. Our ancestors knew more about life than most people give them credit for, and my culture honors their sacred knowledge and still see them as active members of our families beyond death.
Natural history museums began as cabinets of curiosities and quickly became a sign of status for conquering the “new world” by collecting (a.k.a. stealing) objects to preserve “dead cultures” like mine. The majority of the objects you see in natural history museums today (and the thousands in storage that you don’t see) were acquired without the permission of the original owners. While we can’t expect to get permission from a T-Rex, is it really ethical to house funerary human remains in the next cabinet over? While many museums have made efforts (in part by laws like NAGPRA and updated federal regulations) to repatriate objects and take some off of display, the larger issue is still not being talked about; these objects do not belong in a museum and colonizers are profiting off of them.
The advent of colonization in the Americas by the Europeans and the Spanish were detrimental to Indigenous heritage and identity. It thrusted my people into practicing Catholicism and demonized our ancient deities and our ways. This is important to understand because many generations of Mixtecs do not know that our God of Rain remains captive by the American Museum of Natural History inside a glass box. It is time to reclaim him and return him home, but one person can’t do it alone.
I’ve been volunteering at the museum since graduating in 2023 and I was recently asked by another volunteer “how do you feel to have your heritage on display”? How should one feel? Happy? No, quite the opposite. “It’s a terrible feeling” I said. I see people passing material culture snapping pictures and walking away. There is a feeling of shame, anger and disappointment that comes with having culture put on display in glass boxes. Its unethical and disrespectful.
Our culture is not entertainment for others. Our culture are not artifacts for museums. I understand many people do not comprehend how an object can have a living spirit contained in it, but trust me when I say that many people have known this and still believe this as a fact. The concept of a cultural object being on display is an outdated one, and I hope one day I can see the God of Rain return to the homeland in my lifetime.
If you would like to join my mission to learn more and donate, visit https://www.mixteca.org/.
