Six art students at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor are staging an unusual protest against an exhibit on American Indians at the university’s Museum of Natural History that they consider offensive. According to today’s Ann Arbor News, the students were assigned to devise projects to be exhibited at the museum. Instead, they posted translucent screens in front of dioramas depicting American Indian life and distributed fliers challenging the museum to dismantle what they called the “racist and demeaning dioramas.”

The displays, which date from the 1950s and which the museum has talked of removing or replacing, show American Indians as four-inch-tall figurines living an idealized lifestyle and, in some cases, wearing little clothing. One protester, who said the dioramas turned each Indian into a mere “action figure,” questioned what Indians were doing, in any event, in a museum largely devoted to extinct animals and with no displays of other peoples.