BY KAREN BOSSICK
As the Community Library embarked on its current reimagining project, which has involved a two-year makeover of the library, library staff became cognizant of one glaring omission.
“We at Community Library recognize we have a dearth of materials on indigenous people here and we want to change that,” Library Director Jenny Emery Davidson told an audience that had come to hear a Shoshone historian talk about Idaho’s Bear River Massacre Tuesday night.
The library took its first step to address that by constructing an exhibit “Who Writes History? Frontier Voice, Native Realities” at its Regional History Museum in Ketchum’s Forest Service Park. And the exhibit, which examines the co-existence between Native Americans and non-natives in the Wood River Valley during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, will be part of a free tour offered tonight by the Sun Valley Center for the Arts.
SVCA curators will start the tour at 5:30 p.m. at The Center at Fifth and Washington streets with a look at art in the current BIG IDEA exhibition “Unraveling: Reimagining Colonization in the Americas.” The exhibition offers alternative perspectives on the story of colonial history of the Americas, which has long been presented as a straightforward story of European conquest of indigenous cultures.
The tour will then proceed to the Regional History Museum for a look at that exhibition. Today’s Eye on Sun Valley video offers a peek at that exhibition.