This spring I journeyed to Shillong, India with my grandmother and cousin to visit a church we were partnered with there. While visiting, we stopped by one of the major museums in Shillong, the Don Bosco Centre for Indigenous Cultures. The Centre, founded by the Silesians of Don Bosco and part of the Roman Catholic Church consists of seven floors with artifacts from hundreds of cultures all over Northeastern India.

As a visiting third-year student at RIT in museum studies from Mount Holyoke College, I approached the museum with a dubious eye. How was a religious institution going to accurately portray the uniqueness and beauty of cultures that they have converted (Christianity is now the largest religion practiced in Northeast India)? Would they engage their visitors in an unbiased appreciation of these cultures? My queries were resolved on many levels throughout the museum, though I left the museum with concerns too.

My fear that the museum would allude to these cultures as “people of the past” was very much resolved by the end of our visit. Similar to the Smithsonian American Indian Museum in Washington, D.C., the museum celebrated the livelihood of the native cultures in its café, serving food from across the cultures and had hands-on pieces in the children’s space from across the region, like a wooden drum. On the panels by each artifact, only an acquisition number was presented to the visitor, not a date of creation like in most museums. Although this is concerning from a collections perspective, from the visitor engagement viewpoint this creates a sense that these artifacts are not a thing of the past, but still being used today in their cultural context.

The concerning parts of the museum revolve around the facets of religion described in the museum. No mentions of native cultures’ religions were present, leaving a big gap in discussing different cultures. Instead, the Catholic Church had two floors that talked about their history, projects and beliefs. As the rest of the museum was stacked chronologically, beginning with Neolithic life in India at the bottom floor, it would have made sense to have the church be at the top floors, because they came in the last 600 years to India. The church floors felt so out of place with the rest of the museum and I think the experience would have been more enjoyable without proselytizing interspersed between the exhibits.

In the United States, there are hundreds of museums set up by religions to spread their beliefs and discuss their history. People go to them knowing that this is their backgrounds and may go to another museum in the area if this bothers them. The challenge in Shillong with the Don Bosco Centre is that there is not another museum that focuses around the history of the native peoples in Northeast India. Most of the visitors while we were there were either tourists from India or locals. No matter the religious backdrop to the museum, if people want to learn about their history or the history of their neighbors, the museum’s informative platform is where they are likely to turn to-a place where their cultures have been intermixed with religious history. Museums are meant to educate people, to leave a lasting impression about a topic. If the Don Bosco Centre is the only place discussing cultures of Northeast India, will the telling of history for these cultures change in the years to come?  The Don Bosco Centre represents the power of a museum to manipulate the past to tell one side of the story.