Editor's Note: Following this interview, Jim Gatchell Memorial Museum Director Sylvia Bruner received a letter from the Johnson County Commissioners stating that the Board had approved roughly $7,500 from the county’s 1% sales tax funds to support the Indigenous Interpretation project. The museum is partially funded by the county.
Last year, the Jim Gatchell Memorial Museum in Buffalo received $25,000 in grant funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to better tell the story of the area’s Indigenous peoples through its exhibits.
The museum has already spent $5,000 on creating a list of items in its collection that would fall under the project. The remaining $20,000 was terminated by the Trump Administration at the start of April. It also has $15,000 in matching funds that were raised internally to receive the full $25,000 federal award.
Sylvia Bruner is the museum’s director. She has worked at the Jim Gatchell Memorial Museum since the early 2000s and has served as the executive director since 2016. In 2006, the site went through a big redesign as the staff connected the town’s Carnegie library with the museum’s main building.
While taking a class about historical research, Bruner said she realized that the museum had “missed the boat” in that redesign process.
“ When we designated a gallery space to talk about the area’s Indigenous history, we didn't have a single Indigenous person involved,” she said. “ I really can't explain because we had contacts, we had relationships with people, and the fact that we didn't reach out and make that happen is just embarrassing at this point.”
The executive director said she knew she needed to act on advice that she often gives her own kids.
“ So you acknowledge that you've messed up, you've made a mistake, and then what do you do to rectify it?” she said. “For me, that started to look like doing what we should have done in the first place, of bringing Indigenous people into the process.”
The majority of the now-terminated grant funding would have gone to compensating representatives from the Northern Cheyenne, Northern Arapaho, Eastern Shoshone, Lakota and Crow tribes for their work to re-interpret the museum’s Indigenous-focused gallery.
“ Museums, I think, have had a long history of not paying people for their expertise [and] their time, particularly if they come from an underserved population,” said Bruner. “We didn’t want to do that.”
According to Bruner, the intention of the project is to move past the typical definition of consultation and give ownership to the tribal representatives.
“ I don't even like the word consultant because that's not really what we're doing,” she said. “We're not getting advice from our tribal representatives. We are turning over the content control to them to redo the Indigenous interpretation within the museum.”
The folks who are on the Native Wisdom Council for the project include Donovan Sprague, Yufna Soldier Wolf, Bilford Curley Sr., Clifford Eaglefeathers, Venessa Birdinground and Joseph Stewart.
Bruner said the museum is looking for other funding sources and still plans to follow through with the project, but it might take a little more time than originally planned.
“ We can take longer if we need to,” she said. “We don't have this massive time restraint, we weren't in the middle of construction. We know all of those other things that could have happened didn't, so we're very cognizant of that.”
The museum is named after a history buff named Jim Gatchell. He opened the first pharmacy in the small town of Buffalo in 1900, and became well known for both his personal collection of objects that lived in the back of the drugstore and his kindness.
“He would forgive outstanding pharmaceutical bills if he knew the family was really struggling, or he'd hold off on billing,” said Bruner. “ He knew that they had sold their cows at market and had the cash flow, but he just had a real consciousness of the people around him and in his community.”
Gatchell’s collection became the basis for the museum after his death in 1954. It has grown and evolved since, receiving accreditation with the American Alliance of Museums in 2002.
The museum was also one of four museums in the country to win the prestigious National Medal for Museum and Library Service from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) in 2023. The award is “the nation’s highest honor given to museums and libraries that demonstrate excellence in service to their communities,” according to the IMLS website.
