Global Discovery Series: Native American Heartlands
This webinar, hosted by Dr. Lucy Fowler Williams, Associate Curator and Jeremy Sabloff Senior Keeper of American Collections at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, highlights the Penn Museum’s new Native North America Gallery currently in development (opening November 2025) with the insightful leadership of eight Native American Curators from four regions of the United States. The talk also introduces Lucy’s upcoming April 2026 Penn Alumni Travel expedition along the Pacific Northwest’s Columbia and Snake Rivers and its Native American components. Featuring 13,000-year-old cultural traditions, clashes in colonial American history, and Native American voices, the webinar explores topics and conversations of stewardship and repatriation, water and fishing rights, traditional and contemporary Indigenous art, and Tribal sovereignty that amplify the knowledge, resilience, and activism of Native American communities and specialists across the country.
About the speaker:
Lucy Fowler Williams, GR'08 is Associate Curator and Jeremy Sabloff Senior Keeper of American Collections at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. A cultural anthropologist, she received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and M.A. from the University of New Mexico. Before joining Penn, she worked at the Indian Arts Research Center of the School of American Research (Santa Fe), and held internships at the Smithsonian Institution and Metropolitan Museum of Art. Among her projects, she curated the exhibition Native American Voices: The People - Here and Now (Penn Museum 2014-2025); Water, Wind, Breath: Southwest Native Art in Community (Barnes Foundation 2022) and developed the online Louis Shotridge (Tlingit Alaska) Digital Archive (Penn Museum 2011). Her books include the Guide to the North American Ethnographic Collections of the Penn Museum (2003), Native American Voices on Identity, Art and Culture: Objects of Everlasting Esteem (2005), and Water, Wind, Breath: Southwest Native Art in the Barnes Foundation (2022). She is presently developing a new Native North American Hall with eight Native American Consulting Curators (Penn Museum November 2025).
