Making Representations

Museums in the Post-Colonial Era

Moira G. Simpson

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135632717
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Storia
• Categoría: Storia nordamericana

1. Controversial topic - issues of indigenous peoples' exhibitions 2. No other book brings in the post-colonial angle on exhibits

Part 1
Cultural reflections

‘Society will no longer tolerate institutions that either in fact or in appearance serve a minority audience of the élite.’

(Cameron, 1971: 23)

The politics of change

Over the past forty years or so, there has been a tremendous blossoming of cultural expression amongst indigenous peoples and other ethnic minority groups, resulting from a growing awareness of the importance of cultural heritage and the desire for free expression and civil rights. The decades since the Second World War have been years of upheaval and change in the relationship between European nations and those that they had dominated and exploited during the colonial era. Some of the most dramatic and violent were the struggles undertaken by the former colonial nations in their fights for independence. Following the end of the conflict in Europe, attention turned to political issues in countries in Africa and Asia where peoples were fighting for political and cultural autonomy and demanding independence. The determination to end centuries of colonial rule and exploitation in these countries was echoed by the political awakening of indigenous peoples and cultural minority groups in western nations.

This trend was particularly significant in North America where groups which previously had felt unrecognised, undervalued, or disadvantaged as a result of ethnicity, age, gender or sexual preferences began vocalising their frustrations, promoting their strengths, and demanding their rights. The 1950s and 1960s witnessed civil rights disturbances across North America with demonstrations and rioting as suppressed minority groups fought against inequality and racism inherent in every sector of society. In the United States, this period saw the emergence of the black civil rights movement, led by Martin Luther King, and the establishment of more forceful militant ‘black power’ groups, such as the Black Panthers, determined to achieve improved social and political rights for African Americans. Other groups were also struggling to attain basic civil rights in the USA: Mexican Americans formed El Movimiento and took new pride in their culture, turning the previously derogatory term ‘Chicano’ into a description they now embrace with pride. American Indians were reclaiming their cultural heritage and fighting for their rights after centuries of confrontation and exploitation of their land and resources, and decades of pressure to assimilate into American and Canadian society while being treated as second-class citizens. They formed pan-Indian organisations such as the American Indian Civil Rights Council (1969) and the National Indian Brotherhood (1969), (renamed the Assembly of First Nations in 1982), the Native American Rights Fund (1970), and the militant American Indian Movement (1968), to fight for self-determination, tribal recognition, the resolution of land claims and broken treaty agreements, and other issues effecting American Indian communities. As with the black civil rights campaign, there was a move from rhetoric to action during the late 1960s and the 1970s (Deloria, 1973).

In November 1969, American Indians took over Alcatraz Island in San Francisco, maintaining control for eighteen months despite the telephones, electricity and water being cut off by the US authorities (DeLuca, 1983; Horse Capture, 1991). Their action was an ironic allusion to the landing of Columbus and his crew in the Americas in 1492, described by George P. Horse Capture as ‘a grand culmination of the civil rights decade’ (1991: 86); a catalyst for much of the change that has followed.

For the first time since the Little Bighorn, the Indian people, instead of passively withdrawing and accepting their fate, had stepped forward in the bright sunshine and let it be known that they were Indian and proud, and their present situation must and would change.

(ibid.: 88)

Three years later, a group of Indians retraced the ‘Trail of Tears’ of the 1830s with their own Trail of Broken Treaties’ which led to a seven-day occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, DC, which they renamed the ‘Native American Embassy’. In February 1973, members of the Oglala Sioux and the American Indian Movement returned to Wounded Knee, the site of the massacre of 300 Sioux by US troops in 1890, to draw attention to government violations of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. There they were confronted by heavily armed government troops and a 71 day siege followed during which two Indians were killed.

This was a period of intense cultural activity, political fervour, and the emergence of an irrepressible determination to fight for political representation and the preservation of the identity of minority cultures as a distinct part of American society. Reflecting their desire to be American but also to acknowledge their distinct cultural background, there has developed a nomenclature of ethnic identity linked with American nationality resulting in terms such as Native American, African American, Italian American, Chicano, and so on. New federal legislation such as the Indian Self-Determination Act of 1972 and the Native American Religious Freedom Act of 1978 provided tribal groups with greater autonomy. During the 1970s black studies and Indian cultural studies programmes flourished in American colleges and schools. Such movements have brought an end to the concept of the melting pot of US culture and established the importance of maintaining cultural diversity within a national framework.

American museums and the civil rights movement of the 1960s

Museums were not immune from criticisms and militant actions. Critics expressed dissatisfaction with the activities of mainstream museums and art galleries, and the ways in which black and other minority cultures were represented and interpreted in exhibitions. These institutions were perceived by many to be unsatisfactory: serving a cultural élite, staffed primarily by whites, reflecting white values, and excluding from the interpretive process the very peoples whose cultures were represented in the collections. Ethnic minority groups were poorly represented on museum staffs, and so felt they had little or no power over the content of museum exhibitions – a situation which was particularly frustrating for those who continued to suffer the effects of widely held misconceptions, stereotyping and inaccurate representation. Many artists of minority cultural backgrounds felt marginalised by museums and art galleries which were perceived to represent only the dominant white culture, and failed to provide equality of opportunity to artists of non-European origin. Museums came under increasing criticism for their Eurocentric approach towards the representation of cultures. They were seen to hold little relevance to the majority of peoples’ lives and to be failing to meet the needs of minority communities in particular. While most criticisms of museums have been confined to the pages of professional journals or voiced at conferences and symposia, museums have not entirely escaped the protests and activities of political activists and occasionally have attracted more vociferous debate and censure including demonstrations, often noisy and sometimes violent.

The Black Emergency Cultural Coalition was established in the autumn of 1968 and, over the next few months, launched a campaign against the Whitney Museum demanding greater black representation amongst works purchased, artists exhibited, membership of the selection and purchasing committees, and on the museum staff (Glueck, 1969b: 24). They began by picketing the museum but settled down to meaningful discussions which resulted in agreement over increasing representation of work by black artists.

In January 1969, a group calling itself the Art Workers’ Coalition was established in New York and launched an attack on the policies of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) (Glueck, 1969a). The Coalition, whose membership was composed of artists, writers, film-makers, and critics, urged the MoMA to have ‘more cultural relevance’ for blacks and Puerto Ricans and submitted a thirteen-point proposal, the demands of which included ‘the extension of MoMA activities into ghetto communities, the formation of an artists’ committee to arrange shows at the museum, free admission at all times, and the opening of a gallery for black artists’ work’ ( Glueck, 1969a). They also spilled cans of blood in the galleries, and demanded that the MoMA close until the Vietnam War was over and sell $1 million worth of its collection, giving the proceeds to the poor (Alexander, 1979: 227).

On the 18th of January in the same year, the exhibition Harlem on My Mind opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibition consisted of photos, slides, and videos of Harlem, the black neighbourhood in upper Manhattan. While the exhibition proved to be very popular in some quarters, it also attracted much criticism and anger leading to demonstrations and acts of vandalism. Anger was aroused amongst blacks by the fact that it did not contain works of art by black artists and therefore showed ‘a white man’s view of Harlem’. In January 1969, a group of demonstrators picketed a preview and a black-tie cocktail and dinner party at the museum. On the same day several paintings, including a Rembrandt, were slightly damaged by vandals who scratched an ‘H’ on them, referring to Hoving, the director (Arnold, 1969: 1). Two weeks later, paintings were defaced, obscenities were scrawled on the wall of the museum, and a guard injured while attempting to stop further vandalism (Anon., 1969: 74).

African Americans and Puerto Ricans expressed their anger and frustration of white museums and other cultural institutions at a Seminar for Neighborhood Museums held at MUSE in Brooklyn in 1969. In the spring of 1971, American Association of Museums meetings in New York City were disrupted by protesters who presented a manifesto and fought for the microphone on the platform, calling for reform in museums and art galleries (Cameron, 1971: 18).

The events of 1967–71 marked a climax to a period of social unrest and militant action which had addressed wide-ranging concerns from anti-war sentiment to the failure of US-Indian treaties, and from the unrecognised value of the elderly to the cultural inequities of the art world. The passions and resentments that such protests released, reflected frustration over decades of lack of self-determination, misinterpretation, marginalisation and exclusion, but served to draw attention to people’s grievances and the need to address their differing cultural needs. In the United States, the civil disturbances and the cultural revival movement focused attention on the cultural needs of ethnic communities and disadvantaged inner city residents. Changing demographics, such as industrial and commercial growth or decline, population shifts from rural to urban areas and vice versa, changes in ethnic profile caused by immigration, and the growth of tourism bringing influxes of visitors, have caused communities to re-examine their past and present experiences.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, museum curators in the United States gradually began to recognise that the needs of inner-city residents and minority groups were not being met and so began the growth of community museums and a rethinking of the traditional museum role. It was generally felt that museums were not relating to the urban poor; that many cultural programmes offered by museums were merely continuing the ‘cultural colonialism’ of the past and doing little to make museums more accessible or relevant to them. Instead museums needed to play a more socially significant role and respond directly to issues of concern to the public (Cameron, 1971; Noble, 1971b; Robbins, 1971; Kinard, 1972). In the face of the demonstrations which had so disrupted university and college campuses, Kenneth Hopkins recommended fifteen steps to deal with confrontation; recommendations which, unfortunately, remain as necessary today, demonstrating how much progress must still be made in democratising museums (1970: 123–4). During the 1970s and 1980s, exhibitions which focused more closely upon social concerns began to be presented by a number of museums in the United States, particularly the newly developed community museums such as Anacostia, MUSE, and the Museum of the City of New York (Kinard 1985).

In 1971 the Museum of the City of New York began to introduce a series of community orientated projects to serve the needs of the local population: primarily black and Puerto Rican groups living in Harlem. The Museum of the City of New York and Anacostia Neighborhood Museum presented exhibitions dealing with topics of social concern in urban residential areas such as drug addiction and the problems of rats (Noble, 1971a; Kinard and Nighbert, 1972). Such issues, while not the typical subject matter of museums, were of great interest and concern to the residents of the inner-city neighbourhoods which these museums served. These new museums were recognised as being very effective in providing relevant exhibitions, events and educational activities. Furthermore, community involvement was increasingly seen as being crucial to the successful implementation of programmes of exhibitions and activities which better reflected the cultural composition of society and the issues of relevance to the communities in which the museums were situated. John Kinard (1985: 220), the former director of Anacostia Museum, commented that ‘the destiny of the museum is the destiny of the community; their relationship is both symbiotic and catalytic’.

Such political and cultural revival by peoples who had suffered years of oppression, subjugation and exploitation was not, of course, limited to the USA; it reflected a growing world-wide trend which saw indigenous and minority peoples in many parts of the world forming political organisations to fight for the settlement of old treaties, the resolution of land rights issues, and equality of opportunity in all spheres of social and political life. The developments in American museums had repercussions throughout the international museum community and were part of a widespread change in attitude towards the role of the museum in relation to the community. However, the museum profession has continued to be dominated by white staff, and the perennial problem of western-trained anthropologists and historians studying and representing ‘the Other’ continues to be a major issue, attracting criticism from indigenous peoples and those from other ethnic groups who still feel isolated and excluded from the process of representation. An Aboriginal Australian member of the committee involved in the establishment of a community-based Aboriginal research unit at the University of Adelaide expressed this frustration saying: ‘We are tired of being researched; we want to be in the research ourselves, to have a say in what needs to be studied’ (cited in Gale, 1982: 130). The involvement of members of ethnic groups, as partners in the planning process, as advisors, and as staff members, has come to be one of the major issues facing the museum profession in recent years.

Since the 1970s, issues of cultural diversity and related matters have featured prominently on the programmes of numerous regional, national and international conferences attesting to the growing professional concern. The Role of Anthropological Museums in National and International Education was a multinational seminar held in Denmark in 1974. Preserving Indigenous Cultures: A New Role for Museums was a regional seminar held in Adelaide, Australia, in September 1978 which presented a series of perspectives concerning the current and potential role of museums in assisting in the preservation of the material culture and cultural traditions of peoples across the Pacific region. Participants were drawn from many cultures throughout the region and represented museum staff as well as many other professions.

In 1986, the British Museum in London hosted an international conference entitled Making Exhibitions of Ourselves: The Limits of Objectivity in Representations of Other Cultures. The American Association of Museums and the Canadian Museums Association have addressed these issues as major themes of their annual conferences over a number of years. In 1990, sixteen museum curators from Europe and North America attended the Taonga Maori conference in Wellington, New Zealand. The conference was organised and funded by the New Zealand Government, but initiated by Maori elders following the successful US tour of the Te Maori exhibition in 1984. Invitations were issued to a number of curators in major overseas museums inviting them to participate in a discussion about Maori beliefs concerning taonga (treasures) in overseas museum collections. Lectures and comments by Maori speakers forcefully conveyed the strength of Maori feelings concerning the care, display and ownership of Maori taonga and had a profound impact upon several of the participants. Issues associated with the disposition of the dead were addressed by archaeologists at the First Intercongress on Archaeological Ethics and the Treatment of the Dead in Vermillion, South Dakota, USA, in 1989.

From these conferences and meetings have come a number of publications: edited collections of conference papers which document the discussions and concerns within the profession and the development of new approaches to museology, stimulating greater dialogue and fuelling the drive for change. Most notable amongst these have been the twin volumes Exhibiting Cultures (Karp and Lavine, 1991) and Museums and Communities (Karp, Kreamer, and Lavine, 1992) arising out of two conferences held at the International Center of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC: The Poetic and Politics of Representation in 1988 and Museums and Communities in 1990. The Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) has addressed similar issues in relation to American art museums in two symposia held in 1990 and 1991, the proceedings of which were published in Different Voices (AAMD 1992). Dealing with related issues in the field of archaeology, a major series of publications entitled One World Archaeology arose out of the proceedings of the World Archaeological Congress in 1986 at the University of Southampton in England.

Also emanating from the activities of the World Archaeological Congress were two documents which provided the most progressive examples of professional policy guidelines concerning the treatment of human remains and which have been influential in museological policy development in several countries. The Vermillion Accord, a paper drafted by Professor Michael Day, called for ‘mutual respect for the beliefs of indigenous peoples as well as the importance of science and education’ and received the full support of all the anthropologists and indigenous peoples represented at the Intercongress in 1989 (Day, 1990: 15–16). The following year, the World Archaeological Congress adopted the First Code of Ethics, listing the principles and rules which should guide professional practice when dealing with the archaeological material of indigenous peoples (WAC, 1990: 24).

Significant changes in ideology and practices have resulted from the social and political pressures of recent decades. Cultural diversity has come to be an issue of great professional concern and many curators have attempted to address criticisms and instigate new practices, involving communities much more closely in the research and interpretation process and addressing issues of concern to the communities themselves. In some instances this has involved trying quite ...