This image shows the Star House frontal pole from Masset, Haida Gwaii, in the Pitt Rivers Museum last week, together with a projected digital image of the pole in situ before its removal from Masset.
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| [Historic photograph PRM 1998.473.1, by Bertram Buxton. Masset, Haida Gwaii, Canada, 1882; image of photograph in Pitt Rivers Museum by Laura Peers] |
Museum
staff added the digital projector to the Clore Learning Balcony in the Museum’s
main space some years ago, and we use this and other images when we have special
events for tours, special lectures and school groups. It helps to explain
something of the original contexts and meanings of the pole, and to discuss the
importance of the Haida collections in the Museum and the Museum’s
relationships with Haida communities today.
While this
image helps to make those links, its the juxtaposition with the pole and the
visual spectacle of the museum space also underscores the removal of the pole
and its presence in a museum collection. The historic displays in the Pitt Rivers
Museum can evoke colonial histories very easily. We don’t want to celebrate
those histories: we want to comment on them and critique them.
We are also
conscious that Museum staff and visitors are privileged to be able to view and
take inspiration from extraordinary Haida ancestral treasures, and that most
Haida people cannot do the same. While we welcome Haida delegations
periodically, and have put images of all 301 Haida treasures in the collections
online, we know—and regret—that most Haida people will never make it to the
Pitt Rivers Museum. Nor will they be able to view the tens of thousands of
historic Haida treasures in museums across the UK and Europe. Online
collections are a start, but they don’t work for carvers, weavers and other
makers who need to see details that are seldom photographed, and for whom
photography flattens the 3-dimensional realities of objects. As Haida master
carver Christian White pointed out to us some years ago, you can’t tell the
depth of carving from a photograph.
People have
both a right and a need to access their material heritage. In the case of
Indigenous people, access to material heritage is crucial to maintaining
culture, to strengthening identity, and to survival. Not being able to have
access to material heritage is a continuation of colonial relations of power.
If museums are socially responsible institutions, they need to be responsible
to communities of origin as well as to local audiences, and they need to create
greater access to material heritage for those communities.
I am
therefore pleased to say that the Pitt Rivers Museum is working with the Haida
Gwaii Museum, and the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British
Columbia, to prepare for loans from UK collections to Haida Gwaii. It would be
a huge step toward access to get Haida objects circulating through the Haida
Gwaii Museum every few years, to provide continual inspiration and learning for
Haida people. It will certainly benefit all the museums involved. There are
many UK museums with significant collections of Haida treasures and we will be
inviting them to participate in this program.
This will
be expensive and we will have to fundraise: it currently costs about £6,000 to
get one object from the UK to Vancouver, and then there is an additional
journey by air, ferry and truck to the Haida Gwaii Museum. Given airline
schedules, we will have to break the journey in Vancouver, so the partnership
with MOA is key, and will give MOA the opportunity to stage events with Haida
people living in the Vancouver area. We will be asking couriers to facilitate
guided hands-on sessions for small groups of Haida people in Vancouver and
Haida Gwaii before they place items in display cases: it will take
specially-trained couriers to do that, and UK museums will have to learn how to
do so. We will probably have to fundraise for a special, secure case for the
Haida Gwaii Museum to satisfy international lending criteria involving
security, humidity and temperature.
We will all
benefit from this: UK museums will learn from Haida people and share
information to audiences in the UK, Haida people will learn from ancestral
treasures, and we will strengthen ties between communities. Are you interested
in being part of this project, or in supporting it in some way? Please contact
me at: laura.peers@prm.ox.ac.uk
