Refugees Welcome Here!

As a museum of human history and cross-cultural diversity, a place celebrating human creativity and a space of reflection about the failures of cross-cultural relationships, the Pitt Rivers Museum has chosen in its recent Strategic Plan to work actively with refugee communities, with LGBTQ groups, and with other vulnerable communities.

An active program of relationship-building and activities with refugee groups is well underway, and we are exploring how to make the Museum a safe space for refugees, a place where their rich cultures and stories will be valued. Last week, we convened the first Faculty Champions workshop with Oxford faculty in Refugee Studies and the Centre on Migration and Policy Studies, to facilitate teaching on their core topics using PRM collections. 

Some time ago, I recall the former head of the museum service in northern Ireland say that during the Troubles, museums were about the only space where differences could be discussed in a respectful way, the only space where difference was tolerated in public. 

Museums have an important role to play internationally in encouraging diversity, in supporting refugee and immigrant populations, and in educating public audiences and creating tolerance in civic society. We need to step up our actions, to signal publicly, to use the power of visual representation, to take on this leadership role right now. 

@Diversity is our Strength

Powerful Things: a graduate seminar in museum anthropology

I’m really excited to teach my graduate seminar this term. We are focusing on 3 spectacular items of Indigenous heritage, with discussion sessions around those, and working with two different communities to answer their questions about the items we are examining. This should be fun: I am asking all 12 students to turn their keen eyes, minds, sharp pencils and cameras toward these items. This is the first time I have linked student engagements with material culture and community questions, but it seemed a really good way to answer some research questions that came in from one community about one of the items we’ll be looking at. 

[And it's 12 students because that's all I can fit in the research room!]

We are starting with Powhatan’s Mantle at the Ashmolean, which we will examine in its case, but it is an ancient and powerful object to help us develop a material and visual research strategy for the items we are looking at out of case, and to begin to think with objects. This item came from Pocahantas’ father Powhatan c.1630s, during the early diplomatic negotiations between English settlers and Indigenous peoples on the east coast.

Then we’ll go on to look at two items in the research room (ie not behind glass):

A hide Plateau dress, collected by Sir George Simpson and his secretary Edward Hopkins of the HBC in 1841 [PRM 1893.67.7]. Kalispel tribal member Annette Pierre has been liaising with community members to compile their questions for our study of this dress.

And

A woven Chilkat apron, probably Tsimshian, possibly Tlingit [PRM 1884.56.82]. We know nothing about the provenance of this apron, but it was in Pitt Rivers’ personal collection by 1877.  A version of this apron was made by Dolores Churchill while she was studying with Cheryl Samuel, and Dolores Churchill, and Dolores and her daughter Evelyn Vanderhoop are kindly contributing questions and thoughts to our study.

PRM 1884.86.52

Both study sessions will result in extensive documentary records, photographs and sketches, and ‘mapped’ photo-shopped detailed images of the items (visual condition reports) which will be made available publically, online as well as through Indigenous community networks.

In between, we’ll be discussing the changing meanings and roles of material and visual culture across time and cultures, focusing on the social and political roles of heritage items today as Indigenous societies strengthen distinct identities in postcolonial contexts through re-engagements with material and visual heritage. We’ll be thinking about issues of hybridity, cultural change and persistence, heritage, postmemory and sensory engagements with heritage items in the legacy of trauma, and Indigenous survivance.

Very glad as always to have the excellent Giovanna Vitelli along for the course! It will be really challenging, fun, and productive.