Black American West Museum Analysis

The Institute of Museum and Library Services is an independent government agency that tallies the number and type of museums in this country. By their count, there are 35,000 active museums, this represents a doubling of the number estimated in the 1990s (Ingraham 2014). Colorado has around 200 museums and five dedicated to African Americans (Visit Denver, 2016). The Black American West Museum started in the barbershop of the founder, Paul W. Stewart, out of his love childhood love for “Cowboys and Indians. Stewart moved to Denver as an adult and met his first real-life black cowboy, after being told there was no such thing as black cowboys. Exhibits at the museum include the history of miners, buffalo soldiers, pioneers, cowboys, early explorers,

Visitors to the museum are able to envision the struggles and victories of early black settlers. The museum also provides the opportunity to engage in a steady, thoughtful and ultimately constructive dialogue about New Western History. This conversation is not always comfortable or easy, for blacks or whites, to make sense of what they have previously been taught. What I remember about my previous teachings about the West are about a place of untamed land and people, with the heroes who rode in and saved the day, and definitely not a multicultural society. As you move from each exhibit, I found myself engaged while someone who may have a hard time working through this new knowledge may shut down. The two-page self-guided tour handout we all received could help a person who was not engaged at the tour the opportunity to reflect and research further the information to make sense of this new

African slaves who escaped from the plantations found refuge among Indian tribes. Native people were involved in the Underground Railroad, and Indian trails provided a pathway to freedom for runaway slaves. They fought together in uprisings against their oppressive conditions and the white man’s incursion, and they married and had children. However, a number of tribes— including the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws and Seminoles, also known as the Five Civilized Tribes—owned slaves at the urging of the federal government. This was an attempt to by whites to “civilize” the tribes using wide-scale agriculture and slave ownership. The Black Indians story also needs to be told because many American Indians believe the slaves were not treated like servants, but as part of the tribe. Native Americans as slave owners is a complicated narrative because tribes believe they were the sole victims of racist policies. Even today, these tribes have not come to terms with their role in that dreaded institution (Katz,