During the 1960s and 1970s a new type of institution began to appear in Indian communities throughout North America- the tribal museum. Several phenomena contributed to its creation, including the Civil Rights movement and the subsequent reemergence of racial pride among America's first peoples. As federal construction money and various sources of cultural programming funds were suddenly available to spur the growth of these tribal institutions, because of continuing pervasive poverty in Indian communities and the lack of resources for development on many reservations, the governments of the various tribes decided to establish tribal museums as part of their general economic and community development efforts.

But the most compelling reasons for the rise of American Indian tribal museums were cultural. By the 1960s the traditional way of life in nearly all American Indian communities in the United States had changed dramatically. Considerable concern was expressed that the Indian communities now needed somehow to preserve, reinforce, and emphasize their traditional cultural institutions; thus they began to collect the artifacts that represented these institutions and symbolized tribal ideals, and to house them in appropriate new settings, called tribal museums.