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| Research on the box. Photograph by Laura Peers |
Academics
often think of themselves as professional researchers. We have research skills
and experience gained over decades of trawling archives, museum collections and
other repositories for bits of information that are then carefully assessed and
pieced together to understand the past, or the nature of things.
Indigenous
community researchers do all of these things, with an additional impetus and
care that comes of needing to know. Community members doing research on
treaties, historical material culture, art, language and history are driven by
the same passion to know as all the academic researchers I have met, but also don’t
usually have the luxury of not knowing that academics have. Indigenous researchers are driven not
just by artistic or historical curiosity, but by the need to strengthen
identity and culture, to heal from colonialism, and to fight for sovereignty.
Ignorance of the details of history and culture don’t get you anywhere in such
struggles.
I’ve seen
this over the years working with many Indigenous researchers, so it has made
sense to me that after carving all day every days for the past three weeks, Gwaai
and Jaalen go back to their rented apartment in Oxford in the evenings and
search for information in books and online to explain the figures on the Great
Box, the stories referred to, the authoritative sources for these stories, the
provenance of this box, its relationship to other boxes. They have borrowed
books, persuaded me to trawl the internet, emailed other people who might know,
and raided online museum databases. In the process, they have identified
several ‘sibling’ boxes, one of which was collected by Edmund Verney in the
1870s and is now in the British Museum. It seems to have come from the same
artist because the front of the box shares several characteristic features with
the PRM box.
On the last
day of their trip to England, Gwaai and Jaalen are not taking a day off: they
are going to London to see the Verney box, which British Museum staff are
kindly removing from display for them. After their careful appraisal, informed
by carvers’ eyes, we will be a bit closer to understanding the origins of the
box they have worked with so closely for the past month.
