The Great Box Project wins a prize!

So excited to say that the Great Box Project has won an inaugural University of Oxford Vice Chancellor's Award for Public Engagement with Research! We won in the 'collaboration' category, as the project linked Haida people in designing the project and its outcomes.

Part of the work that museum anthropology does is linking collections and the communities that the collections came from—and showing to the public, and to one’s own institution, why such reconnections matter, how they benefit us all. It’s really nice to have some recognition from the University of Oxford that this kind of work does matter in a university context.

And it’s a jolly great project!

Professor Laura Peers wins Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Public Engagement with Research 2016

The Pitt Rivers Museum is delighted to announce that Professor Laura Peers has won a Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Public Engagement with Research. These awards, inaugurated in early 2016 and announced on 1 July 2016, recognise and reward those who undertake high-quality public engagement with research and have contributed to building capacity in this area. Professor Peers won an award in the Project category with the outstanding Great Box project, a partnership project with the Haida Gwaii Museum and artists Jaalen Edenshaw and Gwaii Edenshaw. Further information about the award 

Haida treasures in museums, Haida treasures on loan

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. 

[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

Ceremony to release a robe from the loom

One of the many things I love about Haida culture is the appreciation of finely made works of art. Evelyn Vanderhoop, a master weaver, has finished a robe in the Naaxiin style, a replica of an old Haida robe now in the museum in Victoria, B.C. It is the only robe she knows of (and she is a serious researcher, having visited many museum collections to examine old robes) that features a box design on it, so I talked with her about the piece during my recent trip to Haida Gwaii.

The community is having a ceremony to release the robe from the loom, and dance it into the Haida world, before the robe leaves for the purchaser's home in the United States. The ceremony will be held at the Haida Gwaii Museum, reminding us also that museums can play central roles in communities, cherishing and making material heritage accessible.

I wish I could attend the ceremony, and want to say congratulations to Evelyn on the completion of a masterpiece.

Visiting the Great Box at home

Haida Gwaii, July 2016. Photograph by Laura Peers.

When there are long-term, established relationships between museums and communities, grant-funded projects enable both partners to fulfil key goals, take things in new directions, and spend time together to renew and strengthen ties. The Great Box project is a wonderful example of this.

The Haida Nation and the Pitt Rivers Museum have worked together since 1998, and formalized their relationship in 2009 with the visit of a very large Haida delegation to PRM to work with all 301 Haida objects and establish permanent relationships around the collection for mutual benefit. In 2010, PRM returned an ancestral remain to Haida Gwaii. Artists have come to PRM each year to learn from the collections and to teach Museum staff. Educational programmes at PRM have benefited tremendously from input by Haida curators and artists over the years.

Gwaai and Jaalen asked to do the Great Box project to learn from the historic artist and take that knowledge home with the new version of the box. The new box was shipped home for completion in October 2014 and immediately sparked many conversations amongst artists. It was also used to teach box design to high school students, and a formal unveiling event was held for it at the Haida Gwaii Museum in March. It has been on display there since.

With support from the ESRC Knowledge Exchange Dialogues fund and Linacre College, I was able to visit the box at home in Haida Gwaii last month, and catch up with Jaalen, Gwaai and other Haida friends and colleagues. Jaalen and I did a presentation to community members in the inspiring Performance Space of the Kay Llnagaay HeritageCentre adjacent to the Haida Gwaii Museum. Many people made the hour-long drive from Masset to see the box again and to discuss what we had learned from the project.

Laura Peers (R) and Jaalen Edenshaw (at R by box) in discussion with community members about the
Great Box project, July 2015. Photograph by Geoff Horner.

I also worked with Nika Collison, curator of the Haida Gwaii Museum, to begin planning another series of projects that comes out of the Great Box: an exhibition and book about Haida traditions of box-making. Nika kindly asked many community members if they would talk to me about this and I spent much of my time on island having great discussions with extremely knowledgeable people, from senior artists to a man who makes bentwood box coffins for community members to a woman who brought box-making into a program for youth. Everyone was extremely supportive of taking the project into these directions, and we also talked about how to make the process most useful for Haida artists. We hope to find funding also to hold workshops associated with this next step in which people can view historic boxes, talk about what makes great box design, and actually make boxes. The project needs to fulfil community needs and goals to take the relationship forward. There are many ways such activities would also benefit both museums involved.

We also talked about the major implication to come ‘out of the box’ from the Great Box project: the need for more artists to have direct access to more historic treasures so that this scale and depth of knowledge repatriation can happen. That’s what I’ll talk about next.

We are all researchers

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.

Magic

photograph by Laura Peers

The view from my 'desk' in the Pitt Rivers Museum seminar room/carving studio this week: the magical combination of historic box, new box in progress of being carved, very sharp carving tools, extraordinary Haida artists Gwaai and Jaalen Edenshaw, oh, and a water-cooled Tormek sharpening thingy by the sink. Which now has a plexi screen between it and the historic box, just to keep museological standards up.

I say 'magical' because there are powerful taboos about bringing all of these elements together, even now when museums have gone a long distance toward making collections available to communities to learn from and reconnect with. The process of carving the new box with the historic box in the room brings together museum protocols and values (always having staff in the room with objects, having an alarm on the room at night, not exposing historic collections to damage from sharp tools or water, preserving objects forever) with indigenous community protocols and values, and with artists' needs to  touch the box to measure the dept of carving, to use gauges to record profiles of carved elements, to get samples of new paint as close as possible to the historic paint to match colours. We are all in this together; it's just that there is a powerful kind of energy in the room where all of this, and all of us, do come together.