Sharing Knowledge & Cultural Heritage (SK&CH), First Nations of  the Americas, testifies to the growing commitment of museum  professionals in the twenty-first century to share collections  with the descendants of people and communities from whom the collections originated. Thanks to collection histories and the documenting of relations with particular indigenous communities,  it is well known that until as recently as the 1970s, museum  doors - except for a handful of cases - were shut to indigenous  peoples.

This volume is the result of an "expert meeting" held in November  2007 at the National Museum of Ethnology (NME) in Leiden, the  Netherlands. Since then SK&CH projects have developed. The NME  invited leading indigenous as well as non-native professional  experts in the field from the Americas and Europe to explore and  discuss case studies based on fieldwork, collecting material  culture and/or work with indigenous communities in Greenland, the  Canadian Arctic, North America and Central and South America.