In keeping with Brown University’s goal of exposing its own role in abetting and participating in the enslavement of peoples viewed as “other,” we intend to also critically analyze the connections the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology has to the colonization and genocide of Native Americans.
 
In exploring objects to learn about other people, to be able to hear their forgotten stories, we must first acknowledge who we are.  Here acting as curators, we will not be silent about our own position in relation to the museum and its collection.  As Brown students, we come from a place of privilege; we identify with an institution that has been complicit in settler colonialism and slavery. (For more about us, see Contributors.)
 
We respectfully stand before these objects seeking the many stories of personal relationships and colonial interactions they have witnessed—the intimacy, the wisdom, the skilled craftsmanship, and the desperation and violence. 
 
We look beyond these beautiful things toward a future where we don’t need objects to tell the stories people themselves can tell us.