The Mellon Foundation has provided funding to help the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums establish the “Going Home Fund: Returning Material Culture to Indigenous Communities”, a program that will help facilitate the return of culturally significant items to tribal museums and/or cultural centers. Funds from the Mellon Foundation will be used to create a sustainable program that includes raising public awareness, building connections between tribal communities and non-Native collecting institutions, building the capacity of tribal museums to seek loans and gifts, developing and testing funding protocols and application methodologies to distribute grant funds, and establishing a mechanism to sustain the program.
The “Going Home” project is unique in that it will support the costs of acquisition as well as facilitating loans and gifts. It will include non-cultural patrimony items and build the capacity of Native cultural organizations to meet the standards of care required for loans.
More information on the program can be found here.