Museums, Heritage and Indigenous Voice

Decolonizing Engagement

Bryony Onciul

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138781115
• eBook ISBN: 9781317671800
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Current discourse on Indigenous engagement in museum studies is often dominated by curatorial and academic perspectives, in which community voice, viewpoints, and reflections on their collaborations can be under-represented. This book provides a unique look at Indigenous perspectives on museum community engagement and the process of self-representation, specifically how the First Nations Elders of the Blackfoot Confederacy have worked with museums and heritage sites in Alberta, Canada, to represent their own culture and history. Situated in a post-colonial context, the case-study sites are places of contention, a politicized environment that highlights commonly hidden issues and naturalized inequalities built into current approaches to community engagement. Data from participant observation, archives, and in-depth interviewing with participants brings Blackfoot community voice into the text and provides an alternative understanding of self and cross-cultural representation.

Focusing on the experiences of museum professionals and Blackfoot Elders who have worked with a number of museums and heritage sites, Indigenous Voices in Cultural Institutions unpicks the power and politics of engagement on a micro level and how it can be applied more broadly, by exposing the limits and challenges of cross-cultural engagement and community self-representation. The result is a volume that provides readers with an in-depth understanding of the nuances of self-representation and decolonization.

1
Indigenous Peoples and International Museology

We’ve had systemic prejudice against First Nations in Canada since Canada began, although a lot of people don’t admit it.

(Interview, Janes 2008)

In much engagement work in museums today, there seems to be little realization of what such contact actually entails, and how fraught with suppressed anger and emotion it can be.

(Lynch 2011:150)

For many Indigenous peoples museums can imbue strong emotional responses, from anger and sadness to joy, because ethnographic collections are connected with the traumas of colonial conquest and yet provide a direct link to pre-colonial life. The paradoxical duality of their roles makes museums key sites for post-colonial debate, as they embody colonial narratives whilst having the potential to decolonise the history of former colonial states. For Indigenous people museums can be viewed as culpable bodies of former colonial oppression who continue to keep cultural material beyond source community reach. Yet they are also invaluable resources as store houses of materials that are often vital to the survival and revival of cultural practices. Museums are also desirable platforms for Indigenous voice, presenting opportunities to re-examine the past and present.

Western museums and their practices arrived in Canada with colonialism. The occupation and conquest of Indigenous peoples by European colonial powers supplied museums in Europe with collections from around the globe. Methods of collection and display were used to help justify European aggression and naturalise their dominance over the Indigenous peoples they conquered, oppressed and killed. Consequently, modern collaboration between Indigenous communities and museums is frequently complicated by difficult colonial histories and strong emotions which make engagement a sensitive and complex process.

This chapter gives a brief overview of the international context and colonial history of museums and highlights some key Indigenous protests that have shaped museum practice. In particular, examples are drawn from the English speaking former British colonies of Canada, America, New Zealand and Australia as the Indigenous people in these countries share similar experiences of being colonised and becoming culturally distinct minorities within their own lands. Although there are many differences between the peoples, their cultures and their countries, these nations tend to dominate the Anglophone literature on museums, new museology and Indigenous peoples, therefore it is useful to briefly explore this background to place current Albertan museum engagement with Blackfoot communities into its historical, political and geographical context.

Contact Experience

As the ‘New World’ was ‘discovered’ and colonised, Europeans first impressions of Indigenous peoples were generally formed through the fragments brought back by explorers. Descriptions, artistic depictions, objects, human remains and even living people were collected to inform European audiences about ‘new found worlds’. ‘The earliest representations of Native Americans available to European publics were rare illustrated books about the “New World”’ (Maurer 2000:15). Many of these first impressions permeated the collective imagination and persist to this day despite their colonial subtext and frequent inaccuracies. For example, in 1505 a German book The People of the Islands Recently Discovered showed images of ‘Carib Indian men and women dressed in feathered headdresses’ cooking a meal of human limbs (Maurer 2000:15–16). The uncivilized, exotic, feathered Indian became the iconic image that ‘remained popular throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ (Maurer 2000:16–17). Even today feathered headdresses are erroneously used as an icon representative of all the diverse Indigenous communities of North America. Similarly the term ‘Indian’ is a misnomer that has perpetuated for more than five hundred years, based on a European navigational miscalculation. Since contact Indigenous peoples have had to fight European misconceptions and stereotypes that have sought to render them as less-than-human, savage, uncivilised and doomed to die out physically or at least culturally through assimilation.

Early paintings of the ‘New World’ were enhanced through the exhibition of living people transported to Europe for display. In 1551 a number of Indigenous Brazilians were brought to Rouen, France, to demonstrate their cultural practices for the French King Henri II (Maurer 2000:18). ‘In 1577, Frobisher brought a group of Baffin Island Inuits to England to promote his voyages’ and demonstrate their cultural traditions and life ways (Maurer 2000:19). Initial exports of Indigenous peoples to Europe often had tragic consequences as many died from European diseases or as a result of the long voyages they had to endure. Although some people came willingly, human display was often characterised by derogative and dehumanising frames of display. Saartjie Baartman has been cited as a key example of the display of ‘Others’ as freaks and exotic, erotic curiosities (Wels 2004; Strother 1999; Abrahams 1998; Gilman 1985; Gould 1982). Known as the Hottentot Venus, she was a member of Khoisan peoples of South Africa, who at that time ‘were considered by anthropologists to be the race closest to primate monkeys, together with Australian Aborigines’ (Wels 2004:83). In 1810 Baartman was sold as a slave for display in London and France. After experiencing considerable mistreatment she died in 1815 at the age of 25 and was quickly ‘collected’ once more: anatomist George Cuvier examined, plaster casted and dissected her body, rendering her parts, bones and casts ‘suitable’ for museum collection, where she remained on display until 1980s, finally returning to her community 192 years after her death in 2002 (Wels 2004:83).

Following the colonial discourse of the day, collections were made to ‘salvage’ the remains of cultures ‘doomed’ to extinction. In North America ‘the dominant view was that Indian cultures were in varying stages of decay, and museums had to rush to preserve evidence of pre-contact peoples’ (Hill 2000:103). There was some substance to these claims as contact diseases had devastating effects with ‘estimated post-contact population losses in the Americas as high as 85–90 percent’ (Sundstrom 1997:306). Similarly in New Zealand, ‘a prime motivation was to acquire the unique objects from what many Europeans believed was a dying race’ the Māori (Hakiwai 2005:154).

Indigenous cultural material, sacred items and human remains were increasingly brought into public and private collections as both ‘curio and exotica’ and for scientific documentation. Such collection echoed and reinforced colonial power relations and narratives of ownership of formerly free and independent Indigenous peoples and lands. They helped to demonstrate Western superiority whilst justifying colonial practice by dehumanising colonised Indigenous peoples. ‘Collecting, as a process of ordering and classification, was thus not only a means of salvaging the material traces of disappearing cultures, it was also used to confirm existing theories about social evolution’ (Brown 2014:3). Thus museums were active participants in colonisation, both reflecting and building the colonial societies of their day. As Hutcheon articulates:

The history of most European and North American ethnographic museum collections is one that cannot easily be separated from the specific history of imperialism. Not only were the objects collected often the spoils of colonial conquest (seen at the time as ‘discovery’ and ‘exploration’), but their acquisition and retention have been legitimised by the institutionalization of an ideal (and an ideology) of apolitical, detached objectivity and a positivist commitment to science.

(1994:206)

Items collected during this period are imbued with contention. Stolen, confiscated, unearthed, traded, gifted and bought, cultural material and human remains entered collections and were lost to their source communities. Simpson argues that ‘to many Indigenous peoples, Western-style museums are laden with associations of colonialism, cultural repression, loss of heritage, and death’ (2006:153).

The asymmetrical power relations imposed by colonialism prevented ‘fair trade’. In New Zealand colonialism created a new trade in moko mokai (cured head of captured male enemy) and ‘by 1830, hundreds of moko mokai had been internationally traded via Sydney, Australia, finding their way into major European and North America private collections and museums’ (Tapsell 2005:156).

The pre-1840 dark years of Māori inter-tribal musket warfare provided opportunity for kin adversaries not only to settle old scores, but also to debase the heads of their enemies as trade items with foreigners. The better they were tattooed, the greater the price they fetched—measured in muskets, powder, and shot—thus improving the opportunity to capitalise on one’s enemies even further.

(Tapsell 2005:156)

Franz Boas, often called the ‘Father of American Anthropology’ (Mithlo 2004:749), facilitated the movement of cultural and human material from Canadian First Nations communities to museums:

Boas’s second Northwest Coast visit in May 1888, funded by the Canadian government, had as its emphasis in physical anthropology—the collection of Native American skulls and skeletons, specifically from British Columbia… Boas paid $20.00 for a complete skeleton and $5.00 for a skull resulting in a collection of two hundred crania valued at $1,600.00. The collection was eventually accessioned at the Chicago Field Museum in 1894.

(Mithlo 2004:749–750)

In America, Richard W. Hill, Sr. notes that in the past:

Museums felt that if they discovered an Indian body in the ground, they could claim it for science. All objects made by ancient Indians were thought to belong to the archaeologists who discovered them.

(Hill 2000:103)

The problematic colonial nature of early collecting has resulted in current situations where ‘many museum curators find themselves entrusted with the care of material that evokes powerful emotional responses in their source or home communities’ (Racette 2008:57).

Forming New National Identities

While relations between museums and Indigenous people were initially performed at a great distance with collectors acting as go-betweens, colonisation and settlement brought European and Indigenous cultures into increasing proximity making exoticizing and ‘Othering’ colonised people crucial to creating conceptual distance between the two.

By the mid-nineteenth century, museums were used as educative and ideological tools that displayed Western culture as the triumphant culmination of all life forms on the planet, especially in its superiority to other human cultures, which were seen as less developed and hence inferior.

(Gillam 2001:XV)

Dicks suggests that there is a continuum of difference between ‘Us’ and ‘Other’ that affect peoples’ experience of heritage. Histories of other peoples and other cultures, she argues, are the furthest from self and are the ‘Other’ (Dicks 2003:127). The level of ‘Otherness’ is influenced by the distance between the two in terms of geography, culture and time. By locating Indigenous people as ‘uncivilised’ and from a pre-historic past, colonial discourse ‘Othered’ and distanced colonised people from new settlers in the land.

Tony Bennett notes that in the late 19th century Aboriginal Australians were located by archaeologists and evolutionists as ‘evolutionary ground zero’, from which all people developed and ‘civilized’ (2004:9). They were presented as the most distant ‘Others’ to Europeans, which helped Europeans’ justify their colonisation.

Australia came to be regarded as a place where extinct, or soon-to-be extinct, forms of life survived in the separated enclaves of Aboriginal reserves where the race was supposed to live out its last days. Yet this view of Australia as a ‘living museum’ lasted well into the twentieth century, and certainly beyond the period of ‘let die’ policies directed at softening the pillow of a dying race to the ‘let live’ programmes of assimilation in which the goal of biological elimination, however ‘passively’ pursued, was transformed into one of cultural and epidermal transformation.

(Bennett 2004:155–6)

As the colonies started to form their own identities based on settler populations, attempts were made to present these as distinct from their European origins. Representation in museums was a key part of establishing and authorising new identities, narratives and founding myths.

The ‘first’ museum in North America was the Charleston Museum, a natural history collection established in 1770. In Canada a ‘Lyceum of Natural History and Fine Arts in the City of York’ was proposed to the Upper Canada Assembly in 1833, and a provincial museum that would eventually become the Royal Ontario Museum was actually established in 1851.

(Kaye 2003:96)

Museums were a tool new nations could use to present and define their identity. ‘National museums promote national histories to generate a sense of identification and patriotism within their population’ (Mason 2007:95).

In many developing nations, collections and the institutions have been established to promote unity and a national consciousnes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Table
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Indigenous Peoples and International Museology
• 2 The Blackfoot Confederacy, Contact, Colonialism and Museums
• 3 Engagement Zones
• 4 Transforming Theory into Practice
• 5 Indigenising Museology and the Limits to Change
• 6 Institutionalising Relations
• 7 Decolonising Representation
• 8 Community on Display
• 9 The Cost and Consequence of Engagement
• 10 Where to from Here?
• Glossary
• Appendix—list of participants
• Index