The museum staff also is dedicated to mirroring the way Zuni people traditionally access knowledge. In other words, if someone comes to the museum with a question about sacred or ceremonial knowledge, that information will not be shared unless the person has been initiated into Zuni religious society. “When I went to college, professors told me that knowledge should be free and accessible to all,” Enote said. “That’s different from the Zuni system. So we’ve created a safe place to ask questions, while we also mirror Zuni ways of accessing and transferring knowledge. That’s very different from a conventional museum.”

Indeed, the A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center is a very different sort of museum. Enote commented that it has a special, almost cult-like following among museum experts and aficionados, similar to that of the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, California.

“We’re a remote community, yet our small museum is challenging the notion of what a museum is, and it’s changing museology on an international scale,” Enote said.

Enote described how Zuni elders recalled seeing, as children in the 1920s and ‘30s, large crates leaving the pueblo — crates filled with items from excavations. These items were dispersed around the world, and no one knew who had what. “So we wrote to museums everywhere, asking if they had Zuni items and what those items might be,” he said.

With the passing of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990, federally funded museums were required to be in touch with native communities. Many tribal museums first received stacks of catalogs with NAGPRA-related items, then floppy disks, then CDs, and more recently, online access to digitized catalogs.

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“In the collection catalogs, we saw a lot of incorrect information and misidentified Zuni items,” Enote said. “We had to set the record straight. We talked with the Zuni community, and we gathered lots of contextual information about specific Zuni items in the collections. We compared what we we learned with specific museum-collection catalog descriptions, and the differences in the knowledge about our things were astonishing.”       

The A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center built a system that combined more than 10,000 Zuni items from a variety of different museums. The Zuni museum staff then could add commentary, audio recordings, and even video clips that could be shared, or not shared, with the holding museums.

“We also learned that museums use different systems for managing collections, which had a complete lack of inter-operability,” Enote remarked. “It was like Apple and IBM in the old days; they couldn’t exchange information. So we devised a way to build relationships and connections between the museums.

“This is huge, and it’s shaking up the museum world,” he said. “Many museums have huge anthropological, ethnographic, and archaeological collections, but they aren’t effectively sharing knowledge about those objects among museums — or, more importantly, with the source communities. So we are part of creating a movement, and we’re doing this work internationally. That’s one reason museum aficionados put us on their bucket lists, and it reinforces the idea that a museum should be a trend-setting place, where new thinking about science, technology, art, and new ideas come together and play an important role in the local community.”