Speed Art Museum Land Acknowledgement

An acknowledgment of land is a formal statement that recognizes indigenous people as the traditional stewards of this land and its resources. The Speed Art Museum acknowledges that we sit on the traditional lands of the Cherokee, Shawnee, and Osage Tribes. It is important to acknowledge that the history of native people in Kentucky has often been told with the false and pervasive myth that Kentucky was merely a “hunting ground” for native tribes – a myth created by settlers and land speculators to justify the forced dispossession of native people from this land (often with violence) and perpetuated by their descendants (the beneficiaries of colonization). On the contrary, native people called this land home for thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans and continue to live here today.

In our 2020 Racial Equity Report (published in August 2020) the Speed committed to reexamining our Native American collection. This commitment includes: expanding provenance research and studying emerging best practices for possible repatriation of artworks; exploring best practices in how we present the collection, including recontextualization and reinterpretation; and exploring ways in which we may thoughtfully grow the collection. Because the history of native people in the U.S. is often told by institutions and people who benefited from colonization, we also acknowledge the need to incorporate native voices in telling their own stories.