News from Recovering Voices

Getting it Wright: Community, Collaboration, and Care 

By: Mackenzie Wright 

09/04/2025

As an intern with the Recovering Voices (RV) program at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), I have been working under supervision as a researcher, community support liaison, and collections assistant. This role included my helping to manage the documentation of RV community visits, assist in collections management for communities seeking information about their belongings, photographing/video recordings when permitted, and research into the display history of anthropological plaster face and life casts. During my time here, I have amassed a wide array of new skills, as well as a passion for community collaboration, best practices for collections management, historical research on collections, and assisting with community-led projects driven by and for communities whose belongings are held at NMNH.

My first visit with RV was in March 2024—a visit that helped shape the trajectory of my career within anthropology and the museum field at large. What started as a typical community visit, done through RV’s Community Research Program (CRP), soon became the largest visit RV has hosted, and also a marker in my life history—setting forth my interest and dedication to community-focused research, consultation, and collaboration with a better appreciation for descendent-led collaboration. During this visit, fifteen tribal members/descendants came to the NMNH to visit anthropological plaster life casts of Fort Marion captives/POWs from the Kiowa, Caddo, Comanche, Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, who were held by the US government in Fort Marion from 1875–1878, and then cast for the Smithsonian Institution in 1877. The RV visit included lineal descendants who are working with the NMNH to establish community-based concepts of care, redefining the meaning of stewardship, and reconciliation around this difficult history. The visit was also about helping to support the creation a meaningful space for descendants to reconnect with their ancestors and continue with the healing process by foregrounding Indigenous concepts of care. According to the descendants, they expressed their respect, appreciation, prayers, songs and offerings by engaging in ceremony familiar to their ancestors. 

After being a part of this visit and seeing the ways in which community members, museum staff, and others interacted with each other and their belongings, I realized the fuller extent to the current and potential future work museums are doing and can do to develop and support reparative efforts with communities that have been affected by the consequences of historic anthropological and museum practices, particularly in relation to collections. 

I had the privilege to be a part of five such visits from communities around the world including the P’urépecha from Mexico, the Three Affiliated Tribes (Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara), the Cheyenne and Arapaho, the Shoshone, as well as a Tahitian group. For each of these collaborative efforts, RV, the National Anthropological Archives (NAA), the Museum Support Center (MSC) staff, and the National Museum of the American Indian Museum (NMAI), banded together to provide communities with the tools necessary to achieve their goals and support them inside and outside of the collections space, envisioning long-term partnerships that transcend the museum.

From creating cultural and linguistic education materials for use in their language programs, analyzing craftsmanship techniques of past weavers and artisans, filming documentaries to share their visit with future generations, and a variety of other creative and passionate projects, each group has unique goals that center around knowledge revitalization and dissemination within their communities.

These visits are largely hosted through RV’s Community Research Program (CRP), which aims to improve access to the Smithsonian’s collections, better understand and support the dynamics of intergenerational knowledge transfer, and document, sustain, and aid in language and cultural revitalization efforts. This past year, RV had the most CRP proposals received since its founding in 2012. It was amazing to learn from these about all the different communities from around the world who are interested in collaboration with NMNH and NMAI. I look forward to seeing the projects that originate from this upcoming group of applicants.

During these visits, I assisted with running EMu reports (our collections management system) to locate community belongings held at the NMNH, including information about their acquisition history, collector/donor biographies, materials involved in their crafting, past comments made by other community members, curators, or fellows, and more. I also brought objects out for viewing, managed documentation and guided visitors through the NMNH’s extensive collections storage areas at MSC. This hands-on training in collections, EMu, object handling, and other museum work has been invaluable to my understanding of and advancement in the field of museum anthropology and collections management.

Besides assisting community visits, my work has been focused on documenting the historical and modern contexts of anthropological plaster life and face casts, specifically analyzing their intersection with the pseudoscience phrenology and exhibit histories, as well as their duplicitous meanings in their material, immaterial, ideological, and spiritual aspects. This research helps to create a better understanding of the intellectual and cultural shift in their use and display from the mid-19th century to now, as well as the problems caused by their ambiguous and multiple identities as understood through the contexts of museums, descendant communities, and the public. The Fort Marion descendants visit, since it was descendant led, especially helped to contextualize the meaningful relationships between communities and collections, and the museum’s dedication towards building lasting connections with descendants and affected communities as everyone moves forward together to determine the best outcomes for these collections.

Such collaborative efforts have resulted in two papers we are working on that discuss the historical and current social implications of anthropological life and face casts. One focuses on a collaborative approach with descendants towards building community-centered ideas of care, while the other recounts the topic of exhibition genres of plaster face casts to explicate the types of physical typologies and categories these casts were used to create in museums -- i.e. who is being displayed and for what purpose. This requires museums who hold these kinds of collections to address their histories in collaboration with communities, but importantly with descendants, if that is possible. Future work includes organizing an international workshop on these anthropological face casts to convene museums and researchers working with and stewarding these collections, as a way to help build shared forums and protocols with communities around these collections.

Additional responsibilities and opportunities included writing and editing blog posts (see this article on the P’urépecha!), transferring archived blog posts (prior to 2019) to the updated RV website, attending Anthropology department meetings, presentations, and coffee hours, as well as contributing to an executive summary and report on the life and face cast collections and annual RV report for 2023-2024—but more importantly, getting to know all the other wonderful people within the Anthropology and Recovering Voices department at the NMNH.

Lastly, I want to thank Gwyneira Isaac and Laura Sharp for being two of the most accommodating, kind, selfless, and dedicated people I know who are ensuring that each community visit runs smoothly and respectfully, and for providing me with continual guidance and support as I navigated my internship. As two of the backbone members of RV, both Laura and Gwyn have time and time again demonstrated to me the importance of prioritizing community perspectives, insight, and knowledge when assisting with collaborative work surrounding museum collections. It has been my pleasure to work alongside them and grow to know them better over the course of my time with the Smithsonian.

As I continue to pursue my career in museum anthropology, I could wish for nothing more than to embody these two individuals and the myriads of lessons I have graciously learned from the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, Caddo, Comanche, Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara, Shoshone, P’urépecha, Tahitian community members, and countless other communities and individuals I encountered during my time at the Smithsonian. Thank you all, and I cannot wait to share this unique experience with others!

Mackenzie Wright has an MA in Anthropology and Museum Training from The George Washington University, specializing in collaborative approaches towards museum collections management and the historical/current use of plaster face casts in museums. As an undergraduate at Arizona State University, her senior thesis dealt with analyzing discrepancies in historical records and osteological evidence regarding supposedly peaceful transitions of power during the Christianization of Nubia. During her time at the Smithsonian, Mackenzie worked with Gwyneira Isaac and the Recovering Voices program at the National Museum of Natural History regarding anthropological plaster life and face casts to better understand the intellectual/cultural shift in their use and display from the mid-19th century to now, and their ambiguous/multiple identities as understood through the contexts of museums, descendant communities and the public. She also likes to sew in her free time.