Sandra Hale Schulman
Special to ICT
The Museum of the Cherokee People is getting a new look to go along with its new name.
The museum, formerly the Museum of the Cherokee Indian on the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina, is now in the process of designing new exhibits, constructing a new collections facility and renovating the current facility.
Museum officials announced the new name and plans for construction and renovations on Monday, Oct. 9, along with a new logo and branding. The museum will remain open during the renovations.
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The changes reflect efforts to become a more authentic resource and place of pride for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and its sister nations, the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians, also in Oklahoma. A revised website will have updated resources for the community and visitors.
“As part of taking a look at our mission, it became apparent that we wanted to do a complete overhaul of the museum and where our focus is,” said Shana Bushyhead Condill, a citizen of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians who came in two years ago as the museum’s executive director.
Condill said the museum is an economic driver, serving visitors and telling the history of the Cherokee people, but the time has come to update the story. The museum’s exhibitions effectively end, historically, about 100 years ago, she said.
“We were founded in 1948,” she told ICT. “We’re one of the oldest tribal museums in the country. We are right at the entrance of the Great Smoky Mountains, and we get about three million people a year through here.”
The changes will include moving the older collections to an off-site facility, freeing up square footage for new exhibits.
“For a long time, people would donate things to us that were Native,” she said. “How these objects came out of the ground in the first place, that’s not a great history story. We don’t love that our graves were dug up and these objects were removed.”
A current exhibit, “Disruption,” which runs through Dec. 29, offers a view of what’s to come — contemporary art by Cherokee artists created in response to the museum’s removal of funerary and ceremonial objects.
Modern perspective
The acclaimed museum, which has been named one of the best Native American experiences by USA Today, last updated its permanent exhibits with a renovation in 1998, when Condill was an intern at the museum.
“The renovation in ’98 was amazing,” Condill said. “It was a multimillion-dollar project, but now it’s 25 years old. The Trail of Tears recreation let our own tribal citizens see themselves reflected in that exhibit in 1998.”
It is one of the longest-operating tribal museums in the country, located on the Qualla Boundary, the sovereign land of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and ancestral homelands of all Cherokees, according to the museum’s website.
The redesign will also include restoration and revision of a plaque about Cherokee women that had been placed at the end of the exhibition, she said.
“It was very much an afterthought — five Cherokee women that you might have heard of — that felt off,” she said. “We know how much women participate in our history, and we have a mostly female staff here now. So, a few things in the permanent exhibit are troubling to us.”
The museum’s new visual brand was designed in-house by 26-year-old designer Tyra Maney, Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians/Diné, and conveys a strong sense of place on the ancestral homelands of all three Cherokee tribes with a contemporary edge.
Using a new color palette and image of a spider, the logo speaks to a more inclusive, diverse tribe.
“Around our museum, we have a lot of browns, oranges and red that are pretty typical for museums that are about Native people,“ Maney told ICT, “but they weren’t necessarily what we saw when we look outside. A lot of the ephemera that came with the museum was very outdated — it didn’t reflect who we are today, or even who we have been for generations.”
The current logo includes an exact copy of a carving of a water spider. The new version offers a modern perspective, Maney said.
“In Cherokee history, the water spider is the one who brought fire to our people and the animals who lived here before us,” Maney said. “I modernized it. In the center of the spider’s back, there’s an X that represents the fire that water spiders carry. I took that design, and I did a swirl motion with it to show the constant evolution of Cherokee people and how we’re not our ancestors, but we’re still Cherokee. I added a design to the seat of the spider, and that was from bandolier bags used to represent status.”
Maney took color inspiration from the landscape and flora of the Great Smoky Mountains.
“The blue that we’re using, it’s called Smoky Blue, and it’s based off of the sky,” she said. “A magenta color is based on the flowering trees here. An evergreen that’s based on the trees, a gold meadow that’s based on the touch-me-not flowers that we’ve used for thousands of years. The black is for blackberries; the white is an off-white from the flowers on locust trees.”
Looking ahead
With new technology and cultural change, the museum staff is taking a nontraditional approach to the research and development of a new exhibit, beginning with receiving input from tribal citizens through community listening sessions.
This will empower the next generation of Native museum professionals and academics with a research internship program and allow Indigenous designers and creatives to develop new concepts, Condill said.
“We find that a lot of people walk in the door, and they think they know Cherokee history already,” Condill said. “They think they know what it is to be Cherokee. So, for us, we do a lot of correcting before we can move on. People have seen movies, or they read books and they think they know who we are.”
Dakota Brown, Eastern Band Cherokee and the museum’s director of education, told ICT the changes will add a modern element to the museum. Officials are now in phase one of the research and development for the permanent exhibit, with a grand opening expected in 2027.
“The museum name change reflects that we call ourselves people not Indians,” Brown said. “That leads to how we’re being intentional in the way that we’re approaching research and development for the updates to our permanent exhibit. We aren’t just a history museum or just a natural history museum.
“We are a museum of a people,” Brown said, “and we tell a story of not only the Eastern tribe, but of all three Cherokee nations.”
More info
Museum of the Cherokee People
589 Tsali Blvd.
Cherokee, North Carolina
The newly renamed Museum of the Cherokee People will remain open during a three-year renovation project. A current exhibition, “Disruption,” which features an “intervention” of the museum’s permanent collection by contemporary Cherokee artists, will continue through Dec. 29, 2023. For more information, visit the museum website.
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