Bryony
Onciul came up from Exeter on Friday to give the Pitt Rivers Museum/Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology weekly research seminar, and
spoke about her work on four very different sites of cultural representation
with and by Blackfoot peoples in Alberta, Canada: Head-Smashed-In, Glenbow
Museum, the Buffalo Nations (Luxton) Museum, and Blackfoot Crossing. While these
are very different kinds of museums/cultural centres, all feature Blackfoot heritage
and engagement with Blackfoot people ranging from collaboration to hiring Blackfoot
staff to being developed within a Blackfoot community. Onciul’s book Museums, Heritage and Indigenous Voice: Decolonising
Engagement has recently been published by Routledge.
Onciul
has done a remarkable number of interviews with key players in Alberta case
studies, especially Blackfoot elders and ceremonial leaders involved in these
institutions. Her analysis is especially strong in two key areas. One of these
examines how postcolonial museum practice is embedded into institutions in the
longer term beyond the specific project. This is an issue which many of us who
work in the field have noted for some time, but which is seldom if ever written
about.
The
other is the way that these institutions have approached difficult pasts, and
her focus here is on what she terms ‘displayed withholding’: the presentation
of one level of text and visual display but a conscious, thought-through
refusal to display other levels. This might be because of cultural
sensitivities over sacred material, or because community members such as residential
school survivors deem the past too painful, too active within the community to
want to go into depth in ways that would further traumatise people or continue
the pain rather than heal. Often community consultants visually and materially
reference such issues in ways that signal to informed insiders that they do
know the fuller story but have decided not to tell it. Such displays can be
read at a surface level by outsiders, and often constitute sensitive but
challenging narratives for non-community members. How exhibition teams
determine the ways to mediate between these layers is fascinating, and Onciul
has used the rich archive of the Blackfoot Gallery process at Glenbow to
explore these issues.
