Manifesto for UK museum ethnography?

In my presentation at the Museum Ethnographers' Group conference last week, I included what one colleague has referred to as a manifesto. I don't know about others, but I am frustrated by both the structural limitations and the failure to consider seriously the rights and needs of Indigenous peoples by UK museums. I say that after two decades of trying to find ways to overcome the structural limitations.

Here are the specific calls to action I made in that presentation:

Maybe we could consider the following, within our own practice and within our own museums and professional bodies in the UK:

*formally acknowledge, in the MEG constitution, and in our respective institutional strategic plans, that museums have responsibilities to communities of origin as well as to objects

And maybe we could:

•      Get grants to fund Indigenous teams to work with UK museums

•      Use technology to increase Indigenous presence in museum governance and curation

•      Do electronic fieldtrips for communities of origin 

•      Have free MEG conference places for speakers from communities of origin

•      Create more partnerships between UK museums and Indigenous communities

•      Pay overseas Indigenous partners to write labels, select objects for display

•      Work with the Haida Gwaii Museum to create an exhibition about repatriation and new relationships with museums internationally

•      Discuss the difficult histories of objects on display

•      Fund Indigenous scholars + interns to visit UK collections

•      Reinvent loans as community research opportunities: maybe we could treat loans as always having community research components, and train couriers to facilitate those sessions, and work with overseas borrowing institutions to invite community members to learn from visiting collections

Beyond those immediate things, we need collectively to consider the really key questions and issues:

•      How do we increase the presence, voice and authority of Indigenous peoples in UK museums?

•      As museum professionals and representatives, how do we create more ‘active relations of reciprocity and dialogue’ [Clifford 2018] with communities of origin than we have now?

Student power: eyes for those who cannot visit

This past term, graduate students in the University of Oxford seminar ‘Powerful Things’ (offered in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography) acted as the eyes for two different Indigenous communities, recording visual information and taking notes on two different items of material heritage. In the first session, the students examined and photographed and sketched a Plateau dress [1893.67.7] from HBC officer Edward Hopkins’ collection, thought to have been acquired in 1841. Two weeks later, the students did the same with a Chilkat apron [1884.56.82] that was in General Pitt Rivers’ collection by 1877.

The idea for these sessions came from members of the Kalispel community in western USA, who had found information about the dress online and asked for images of the address. As with many items in the Pitt Rivers Museum collection, the museum had not yet photographed this important item. Normally I might have gone down to the textile store and taken some photographs myself. As I knew I would be teaching the seminar, however, I had the idea to ask all 12 students to observe, photograph and record everything we could about the dress. Then I thought it would be interesting to give the students the chance to observe and photograph a second object made of very different materials. For each item, Indigenous community members contributed questions about the object for the students to answer. This contact between the communities and the students was really helpful for the students in their learning.

Students in the 'Powerful Things' seminar in action

Both sessions were very successful. The students got to learn from important historical teachers, and they also learned what a privilege it is to have access to such collections. At the beginning of each session, I acknowledged and thanked our teacher and told the students that it was our responsibility to provide as much useful information to the communities of origin as possible because it was quite likely that most members of those communities would never have the chance to see this object in person. That is a regrettable truth about Indigenous collections in museums in Britain.

The students took this responsibility very seriously. In each session they produced over 100 photographs and sketches, and tried to answer all the community questions for each item. We have now uploaded images to a dropbox for each community and will be putting them online as well.

This process has taught me that it is possible for students to work as volunteers for Indigenous communities and to provide some visual access to material heritage held in overseas collections. I look forward to talking with members of these two communities about how to make such images and information most useful to them.

"Source Communities"

Back in July 2013, at the Future of EthnographicMuseums conference, the excellent Wayne Modest spoke about the way racism and colonialism seem to haunt ethnographic museums, and the extraordinary institutional amnesia most museums seem to have about their histories, and the role these histories played in constructing colonial relationships of power. It was a thought-provoking presentation. As part of his querying of issues of power in museums, Modest problematized the term ‘source communities’, asking how museum engagements with such communities might conscript them to a status of difference vis a vis the mainstream audiences which remain the staple ones for museums, and which fund museums.

In 2003, Alison Brown and I published Museums and Source Communities, a reader of newly commissioned and republished articles about the relationships between museums and the communities that their collections come from. The volume was UK-oriented, and we hoped it would help to strengthen the sense of responsibility between museums in the UK and the mostly overseas (but now often immigrant) communities whose material heritage is cared for and displayed in those museums. We realized that access to those historic treasures is crucial for maintaining identity for certain groups, and indeed for aspects of cultural survival. Given the physical and political distance between museums in the UK and those communities, we were concerned that museums in the UK did not take this relationship seriously. At a conference, I once asked a deputy director of the British Museum whether he understood that communities of origin might have greater need to access their material heritage than, say, London audiences, and might require more institutional and staff resources spent on meeting those needs. He said no, he didn’t see that, and thought that all audiences should be treated alike, that to do otherwise would be discriminatory.

For the book, we chose the term ‘source communities,’ rather than ‘communities of origin’ or other possible terms, as a convenient and deliberately direct term, hoping to see it become part of ordinary professional language and thinking. It has done so. UK museums have shifted tremendously across the past decade, embracing the concept of special relations with source communities and engaging in many special projects with these communities. The idea that museum collections can play special roles in marginalized communities, or might have social or biomedical or therapeutic healing properties, has also been extensively researched. Concepts of audiences and access have been debated and museums have begun to try to diversify their audiences in serious ways. The profession has really moved on.

The term ‘source community’ has been critiqued by some Indigenous people as implying an extractive relationship. As Brown and I noted in the introduction to Museums and Source Communities, that is precisely what the nature of the relationship was historically. Is it still so today? Have the attempts to create relationships of greater equality made ‘source community’ an awkward term in the present? I’m not so sure. I still favor the directness of the term, the implication of deep and ineradicable tensions and relationships between the partners involved.  And in answer to Modest, I think I’d say that there is still need of a concept of ‘special relationship’ between museums and these communities, so long as the material heritage housed by museums is still desperately needed for cultural survival. Yes, that’s a status of difference, but one I think will be necessarily with us for some time.

Word cloud from comments on the Blackfoot Shirts Project exhibition

Curators and Ceremonies

Detail, Blackfoot shirt 1893.67.3, Pitt Rivers Museum

In the summer of 2012, I attended a traditional Blackfoot ceremony in Alberta, Canada. These days, with museums developing relationships with Indigenous communities, curators are sometimes invited to ceremonies as part of the process of relationship-building and to educate us about their cultures. I have had the privilege of working with Blackfoot people and attending ceremonies with them since 2001.

There are protocols for attending Blackfoot ceremonies. Women wear moccasins and long skirts and shawls, and I have a special set of clothing that I keep for these occasions. It is not permitted to photograph or take notes during ceremonies: you are expected to learn by observing and thinking about what you see, and taking it into your heart. Since traditional knowledge is passed on experientially and by various forms of initiation, it is also not appropriate to describe ceremonies online, especially for an outsider such as myself. Sometimes, though, there are things that I notice during ceremonies that have more to do with the bigger picture of what is happening, rather than what is going on in the ceremony, and these observations can be a way of learning. They can, especially, be a way of learning why it is that a museum curator like myself comes to be sitting in a ceremony, feeling clumsy and bewildered, hoping desperately not to make embarrassing mistakes. There’s a reason you’re here.

June 2012, somewhere in Blackfoot Territory, Alberta, Canada: Two enormous tipis have been pinned together to hold everyone for the ceremony, and they are now billowing and creaking in a prairie windstorm. It is a bit like being on a sailboat in a high wind. There is a fire in the other tipi near the elders and those who are running the ceremony; I can smell the smudge and hear the fire crackling, but am tucked in a corner and can’t see them. The grass sticks to my moccasins, the food is incredibly generous, and whoever put the berries in the frybread is a genius.

There is such a good feeling here, it’s relatives and friends gathering to be blessed and to support those holding the ceremony, and those of us ‘from away’ are welcomed warmly by friends. At one point there’s a pause in the proceedings while people are invited to have their faces painted, which is a way of blessing people, asking for protection and assistance. We all line up and as I am waiting my turn, I notice two little girls in front of me who look like they are about 4 and 7 years old. They go up to the ceremonial people who are painting us, completely confident. They tell their Blackfoot names to the woman who is praying for them, they know the prayer, they turn around at the right time, give the blessings back to the woman who is praying for them, and go skipping off together after it’s done, braids bouncing behind them.

These beautiful, confident girls have no idea of the weight of history and politics behind this. It’s normal to them. Where we are, what we are doing, what they have just done, is precisely what missionaries and government tried to destroy. I am humbled and very moved: what incredibly strong people, to have survived everything they have been through and to raise such children. It’s a reminder about why we are learning to work together across cultures. Every time I wonder why I am doing this work, I will remember those little girls.