Community Links

The following list features online resources comprised of virtual exhibits, museum websites, oral history repositories, archives, and interactive maps that reflect the diversity of indigenous and multilingual communities in Michigan and beyond.

• Arab American National Museum: The Arab American National Museum (AANM) is the only institution in the nation dedicated to telling the story of Arab immigrants and their descendants. Located in Dearborn, the heart of the Arab American community, the museum holds one of the country’s largest archives of Arab American historical documents and art. At its core, the museum honors the invaluable contributions of Arab Americans to the American story. 

• Chaldean Cultural Center: From the court of Nebuchadnezzar to immigrant-owned businesses in Detroit, this museum will take visitors into the mythic journey of the Chaldean people, from ancient times to the present. The first of its kind, the Chaldean Cultural Center offers an immersive, provocative experience into the history, arts, traditions, and religion of an entire people, and their contributions to the metro Detroit area. 

• City Walls Detroit Mural Maps: Launched by Detroit's City Council in 2017, this site tracks all murals commissioned by the City Walls Program, which seeks to enhance public space and empower Detroit's artists and communities. Featuring over 120 murals, this map offers an immersion into the city’s impressive urban art and into the communities these murals aim to commemorate.

• Halal Metropolis: This project features several exhibitions documenting the contributions and prominence of Muslim population(s) in the Detroit metro area, one of the largest and most diverse in the U.S. This site also showcases narratives that challenge the simplistic stories around larger Detroit’s reemergence story. 

• Indigenizing the News: Through a partnership with Traverse City Record-Eagle, this program focuses on improving Indigenous news representation in the state of Michigan. The partnership supports Indigenous writers to report, consult, and train in the Record-Eagle newsroom. The journalists also co-publish their work on the Indigenizing the News website. 

• Language Resource Center: Based at the University of Michigan, the Language Resource Center (LRC) provides language learning support with a world language library, an audio/video production studio and a variety of technologies used in language instruction. The LRC actively engages in applied translation through the Language Bank and Translate-a-thon which connect members of our multilingual campus with local organizations to provide no-cost translations. While Translate-a-thon occurs only once a year, the Language Bank is open to submissions year-round.

• “No, not even for a picture”: Re-examining the Native Midwest and Tribes' Relations to the History of Photography.This exhibit inquires into how photography has been used as cultural artifact to enforce settler colonialism. The project documents how colonizers and their institutions have deployed photography by violent means—disregarding notions of consent and agency—and relied on the pictures to perpetuate the legacy of dispossession and displacement of the Anishinaabe peoples.

Are there any other sources you’d like to see featured here? Give us your suggestions by emailing translatingmichigan@umich.edu.