MCN 2026

The National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) is defined by its relationship to the communities and people who are connected to the museum’s collection. Though the museum’s collection of Native items is the largest in the world and contains many artistic and cultural masterpieces, we strive to let visitors to our museum understand that each of these items is a starting point to cultural understanding. As a museum of living cultural history, the NMAI has unique challenges to meet our visitors where they are, provide an engaging experience and to help develop new understandings about Native peoples. We hope to have visitors think about the museum as defined by a collection of relationships as much as a collection of items.

In this short presentation, Daniel Davis and Melissa Shaginoff will present their work on the Welcome Media project that seeks to highlight the diversity, hemispheric scope and most importantly the centrality of collaborative relationships that are necessary to build the trust with Native communities who teach us how to present their culture and to care for the items in our collection. The Welcome Media project is a series of short films that will show daily at our museum in Washington DC and in New York beginning in the fall of 2026. The films were designed to be interchangeable allowing the museum to add additional stories to the cycle in the future. Through findings from an ongoing visitor study by HG and Co, we learned that most visitors appreciated knowing more about the Museum’s relationship with Native communities. The study found that a few visitors expressed skepticism that these relationships were truly deep and authentic, and we feel the Welcome Media project should help to resolve these lingering doubts.

At a time when social media’s engagement obsession has made it feel like the truth no longer matters and the use of artificial intelligence has given rise to mistrust of science and expertise, this project will emphasize the real time commitment to building relationships with our Native and non-Native constituents. We believe that by showing how the museum works and allowing visitors to hear directly from contemporary Native people, visitors that experience our museums will have a greater trust and in what they learn during their visit. Further, by realigning visitor’s expectations and helping them to realize that they are part of a network of connection through the items they see on view, they can have a richer and more impactful experience that may change how they see Native people today.

In this presentation, we will present data from our visitor studies testing messages and understanding our visitor’s expectations, explain the development of a modular film cycle that can be revised and adjusted in the daily screenings, profile how the team made decisions about which communities to feature and show clips from the final media products.