Museum of the Cherokee Indian honors ancestors

Shanna Bushhead Condell is a native of the eastern band of the Cherokee Indians and has always considered western North Carolina and the home of the Smokies. Because her father traveled to work in the “Indian Country” across the United States, she was born in Montana, then lived in Oklahoma and Wisconsin until attending Illinois Wesleyan University.

“My parents took me to museums for as long as they could, and we’ve always enjoyed history in general,” she says. “For whatever reason, I never thought about doing a museum until my English teacher brought in a speaking Danyelle Means (Oglala Lakota Nation) who was working on the new National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). drugs since then.

Condell has created her interdisciplinary course, interning at both the NMAI and its adjoining Great Smoky Mountains National Park Tribal Museum. Then she applied to all the museum studies programs she couldn’t find—not many back in the day—and ended up at the University of Delaware, where she earned a master’s degree in history and museum studies.

Today Condell is Executive Director of the Museum of the Cherokee Indians (MCI) on the Cala frontier, the ancestral homelands of all three federally recognized Cherokee tribes and the sovereign lands of the eastern band of the Cherokee Indians, owned by the tribe and held in trust by the federal government. Her career focuses on original acting…