travel – The Peabody

Contributed by Ryan J. Wheeler

It was really fun to encounter Peter Toth’s monumental wood carving of Sequoyah outside the Museum of the Cherokee People. Toth created over 70 of these sculptures as part of his Trail of the Whispering Giants project. I met the artist in 1983 when he was carving a tribute to the Seminole on Fort Lauderdale beach.

Four members of the Peabody Institute team attended the 2025 Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums (ATALM) conference held in Cherokee, North Carolina this October, continuing our tradition of sending personnel that goes back about a decade. This year’s conference saw over 1,000 museum, archive, and library professionals convene at the meeting facilities of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, coinciding with the festivities of the 113^th Cherokee Indian Fair. The fair featured a parade, agricultural and cultural events, stick ball, an art show, and more.

The Cherokee Day parade featured contestants in the Miss Cherokee pageant, lots of agriculture themed floats, marching bands, a drum line. And candy. So. Much. Candy!

Back at the conference, attendees had lots of opportunities to network and learn at expert sessions and demonstrations. Highlights for the Peabody team were visits to the Museum of Cherokee People, Qualla Arts & Crafts Mutual Co-op, the Oconaluftee Indian Village, the informal NAGPRA networking session, the Repatriation Talking Circle, and One Square Inch of Ceremony (and additional workshops with Lily Hope, Tlingit artist, educator, and community facilitator). Marla Taylor, Peabody curator of collections, participated in the session Institutional Approaches to NAGPRA Duty of Care, along with colleagues from museums, universities, and the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.

Canoes are everywhere! Exciting to see this dugout canoe at the Museum of the Cherokee People. The museum, one of the earliest Tribal museums in the US, has a series of great interpretive panels questioning how best to tell the Cherokee story. For example, why do museums always begin with PaleoIndians? Back to the canoe–this great example of a dugout is about 200 years old and was found in the 1970s on the Chattahoochee River near Helen, Georgia.

Many great meals were shared as well, but the best part was reconnecting with old friends, meeting colleagues regularly seen on Zoom in person, and making new friends. If you haven’t attended an ATALM conference, we highly recommend it!

Contributed by Lainie Schultz

Emperor Franz I and his natural science advisors

This summer I went to visit a friend in Vienna. I hadn’t seen her in [*cough*] years, so my inspiration was mainly just to hang out with her. It was only after I had my plane tickets and the trip was drawing near that I actually started looking into what there was to do in Vienna.

Turns out, the Venus of Willendorf is there. For a museum nerd I don’t tend to visit that many museums when I travel, but the Venus of Willendorf is famous enough (there’s even a cast of the original here at the Peabody) and I am nerd enough for that to justify seeking her out. This meant dragging my friend to the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien.

If you had asked me beforehand what I expected of the place, I’m not sure what I would have said. I’m familiar enough with the broad-strokes histories of museums and their ties to imperialism: As nations started to push further and further out into the world during the Age of Exploration, voyagers brought back evidence of their encounters with new environments in new places, creating displays that combined minerals, plants, animals, and man-made “curiosities.” These collections offered opportunities for viewers to learn about the world, as centered by their home locations, but equally they offered opportunities for displayers to demonstrate their status and wealth, the power of their influence and access – not just how they saw the world but how they wanted others to see them in it. If you look for it, this history is written into the architecture and design of museums, and I have been academically trained to look for it. So maybe if you had asked me beforehand what I expected of the Naturhistorisches Museum I would have said “nothing new.”

Reader, I was wrong.

This place was every piece of museum history I had ever learned, jacked up on steroids. It was everything I had been taught to expect dialed up to a ten, with a little extra more thrown in just for fun. It was contemporary best practice crammed into 19th century display cases surrounded by imperial displays of awe and wonder, and I was there for every moment of it. Just please don’t ask me much about the exhibits themselves! I was far too distracted to notice.

Neither my photos nor even the museum’s does this place justice. Try exploring a bit more with some select collections, online exhibits, or a virtual tour.