9801: Introduction

NARRATOR (TANTOO CARDINAL): Hello, my name is Tantoo Cardinal. I’m from the Metis Nations of Canada, and I’ll be your guide through the exhibition Art of Native America: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. I’d like to welcome you to the exhibition and thank our sponsors at Bloomberg Philanthropies for their generous support. We stand today on ancestral lands of the Lenape Indians. Patricia Marroquin Norby is Associate Curator of Native American Art in the Met’s American Wing: PATRICIA MARROQUIN NORBY: The American Wing acknowledges the sovereign Native American and Indigenous communities dispossessed from the lands and waters of this region. We affirm our intentions for ongoing relationships with contemporary Native American and Indigenous artists and the original communities whose ancestral and aesthetic items we care for. We understand that these items—vibrant expressions of Native sovereignty, identity, and connections to community and family—embody intergenerational and environmental knowledge, including origin stories, languages, songs, dances, and ties to homelands. We commit to pursuing continuous collaborations with Indigenous communities and to presenting Native American art in a manner that is inclusive of Indigenous perspectives, involves guidance from source communities, and creates space for respectful listening and thoughtful dialogue. We will work to advance Indigenous experiences in The Met’s exhibitions, collections, and programs. We will strengthen our awareness of historical and contemporary environmental issues in the New York region and throughout North America, in order to thoughtfully reckon with our own institutional legacy and its impact on the lands, waters, and original peoples of this place, which are, and will always be, inextricable.