As Dr. Kelli Mosteller, incoming executive director and CEO of Oklahoma City’s First Americans Museum (FAM), chats with Luxiere from her office at Harvard University, it’s clear that Mosteller—whose job was once “auntie for the eagles at the Citizen Potawatomi Nation Eagle Aviary”—is precisely the right person to meet this moment in FAM’s existence. She was also the perfect person to step into the position she’s now leaving, executive director of the Harvard University Native American Program, a post she’s held since 2022. Before that, she was the exact right person to serve her tribe, Citizen Potawatomi Nation, as executive director of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation Cultural Heritage Center in Shawnee.

How can this woman step so seamlessly into such a unique series of leadership roles? It helps that she’s a historian by education and by nature. “I knew, from when I was 10 or 12 years old, that I was going make a career in history in some capacity,” she says. “My grandmother was very much the historian of the family. She actually helped found the Citizen Potawatomi Historical Society, which is our tribe’s history program, back in the seventies.” When she was executive director of the Citizen Potawatomie Nation Heritage Center, Mosteller and her team were sorting through some old documents and found her grandmother and great-grandfather’s Citizen Potawatomie Nation Historical Society membership cards (they were members number two and seven).

Mosteller earned her undergraduate degree at Oklahoma State University and holds a Ph.D. in American History from the University of Texas at Austin, with a focus on Indigenous studies. Her work has been recognized with numerous awards, including being named one of Oklahoma’s “50 Women Making a Difference” by The Journal Record.

She tends to think of herself as an auntie; an affectionate, respectful term used in some Indigenous communities for a matriarch who takes care of people, makes sure traditions are carried forward and teaches and supports the next generation. As she describes her work, it seems like she’s right about that. Her superpowers are taking care of people and tradition and making sure anyone—and anything—entrusted into her care is treated with respect.     

Her Harvard position is a great example. It involves providing wrap-around support for about 160 of the 335 self-identified Native American students at the venerable, imposing Ivy. Any guesses as to how she describes her role? “I always say my number one job here is to be like an auntie. I am Auntie Kelli. My first job is to make sure my kids feel like they have support, and somewhere to land. A safe place where they’re going to be taken care of. And every other thing I do beyond that is in service of making sure that those kids feel like this is a good place for them, where they can do their best academic work.” She continues, “We wrap students in a big blanket of holistic care from the moment they think they want to apply, up until we literally wrap them in a blanket when they graduate. We give them a blanket at their graduation ceremony.”

Mosteller’s museum and public history experience and her background with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and Tribal Historic Preservation were additional areas of expertise Harvard needed, and the sooner the better. “The same summer that I was hired, they released the ‘Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery’ report, in which the university looks at its own history of enslaving not only people of African descent, but also the Indigenous people of New England.”

Part of that, she said, meant dealing with the collections of things like hundreds of Native American children’s hair samples in Harvard’s Peabody Museum. A report issued in 2022 revealed that Harvard holds in its collections the remains of thousands of Native American people. “I’ve been put on every committee you can think of having to do with NAGPRA, human remains or other objects in collections that are really problematic and have a lot of ethical questions around them. I’m doing a lot of educating of the people within Harvard about how Native communities view some of the collections, how they view the stewardship of these collections and what consultation truly looks like,” Mosteller says. She is hopeful that efforts by Harvard and other institutions to return important and sometimes sacred objects to tribes will gain momentum.  

During her 12 years at the Citizen Potawatomi Nation Cultural Center, she built the museum from the ground up—twice. “The first one was planned. My first few months on the job, we tore it down to the ground and started a rebuild,” she says. The organization had secured grant money for the project, and had an idea for the narrative and how the galleries should be presented. “That was a controlled build, where you know exactly what you want your gallery to look like.”

She pauses. “The other was when we had the flood. Everything was ripped out and we brought in saws in the middle of the night, and disaster mitigation and insurance companies. That was sort of the worst-case scenario. It was almost two and a half years of just disaster mitigation and water damage control, and not quite knowing how the insurance situation would work out, and building without having a real idea of what would be possible or what the final budget would be.”

Those experiences taught her that, in the end, “What you need is a space and a narrative and galleries that are really able to be impactful for all the audiences that you’re trying to speak to.” She also learned not to place things directly on the floor unless they were on casters, and to take a more modular approach. “Each gallery was sort of thought of independently, so that if something needed to change, you don’t have this domino effect of ‘The electricity on this side of the wall doesn’t work now, because you changed something over here.’ We were able to sort of rethink the space as a little bit more of your traditional, chronological narrative, but also what themes we wanted to pull throughout.”

The team focused on leadership, material items like clothing, survival and culture. “What did leadership look like in each of the eras of our tribal community clothing? Because that’s part of that material culture …We also thought about survival in each stage. What does the survival of not only our people, but our culture and language look like? So we knew we had this big plan for a chronological narrative, but we also could pull these consistent themes throughout, and that really worked out well for us.”

As Mosteller re-enters the world of museums, she plans to wade in slowly, making sure she takes care of the people involved. “The best thing you can do is to come in, get to know people as people, get to know people in their roles, what their goals are for their own positions, what their goals are for the institution,” she says. “I need to understand how our relationship is going to work with OKANA”—the dazzling new resort soon to be FAM’s next-door neighbor—“and really orient myself to what’s already being planned, what is possible in the next six months … I think if you come in with too many concrete ideas about exactly what want to do, maybe it won’t work, and you’re trying to force a square peg into a round hole.”

A lifelong academician (and auntie), taking a well-researched, thoughtful, human-centered academic approach. Sounds like she’s the perfect person for this moment in FAM’s history. •

The Luxiere List: First Americans Museum

First Americans Museum (FAM) is located in Oklahoma City, along the Oklahoma River, on land inhabited by Indigenous people long before the United States was established, including the Apache, Caddo, Tonkawa and Wichita. Others have a historical relationship with the region, including the Comanche, Kiowa, Osage and Quapaw. The land FAM stands on was once assigned to the Muscogee (Creek) and Seminole.

The museum, open since 2021, has hosted more than 400,000 visitors. The breathtakingly beautiful 175,000-square-foot museum allows visitors to experience the collective histories of 39 unique First American Nations in Oklahoma today.

Current Exhibitions:

FAM’s signature exhibit, OKLA HOMMA, shares their stories through works of art, interactive media and film, exploring tribal stories from ancestral origins to present day. OKLA HOMMA represents more than a decade of careful consultation with each of the 39 tribes, Knowledge Givers and scholars. Developed by an all-Native curatorial team, the exhibition shares tribes’ diverse lifeways and experiences rather than presenting a singular, authoritative narrative.

WINIKO: Life of an Object, Selections from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian returns objects from the 39 tribes to Oklahoma for the first time in a century, and is an examination of the things we create — how they reflect values, possess spiritual significance and carry tribes’ ways into the future. Winiko is the Caddo word for everything on earth, in the universe and beyond, and reflects the Native belief that cultural materials hold the spiritual essence of their makers and those who used or wore them.

One Place, Many Nations: Acknowledging the 39, the newest exhibit, will be on display through May 2025, and is full of hands-on activities, interactive experiences and rotating objects that share cultural experiences. This exhibit is free to see in the Community Gallery.

Vessels that Carried Us: Kiowa Cradleboards. Cradleboards are a symbol of resilience and care, generally made during a pivotal moment in women’s lives. Traditionally, the geometric designs
would be symmetric on both sides of the cradleboard and have similar designs and motifs, but they may not be the same main color. Different adornments placed on the cradleboard are more than decoration and serve a purpose towards the child’s development. Kiowa cradleboards are considered prized possessions because of the intricate beadwork and how much effort goes into each one that is made.

21st Century Mound Builders is an outdoor experience available at no charge during FAM’s operating hours. The design of the museum’s campus translates ancestral mounds into steel, glass and landscape architecture. The FAM Mound rises to a height of 90 feet and serves as a cosmological clock. The cyclical movement of the sun can be tracked along the Mound Path throughout the year. The FAM Mound honors Mound Builder cultures that thrived across North America from about 3500 BCE to 1751 CE. Many of the tribal nations in Oklahoma today are descended from these cultures. For some communities, mounds remain prominent in ceremonial life.

Chef Loretta’s Garden is open during the museum’s operating hours at no charge during good weather. In collaboration with Shape Your Future, FAM Consulting Chef Loretta Barrett Oden (Citizen Potawatomi Nation) has cultivated a vibrant teaching garden that features edible plants indigenous to the Americas, such as corn, tomatoes and peppers.

Learn more at famok.org