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Historically there has been an extensive scientific interest in the lifestyles, knowledge, cultures, histories, and worldviews of indigenous peoples. The majority of the great museums and universities of the world have built magnificent collections of art and artifacts from the indigenous peoples of the world. An increasing number of indigenous peoples are now calling upon the museums and universities to return at least parts of their collections and/or the knowledge about these collections. They demand that the artifacts and knowledge their ancestors shared with researchers, are made accessible to them.
The indigenous peoples of Canada and the United States, from an international point of view, together with the indigenous peoples of New Zealand and Australia have been forerunners in this process of linking scientific research with political and ethical debates. This has led to ethical debates that call for a dialogue with indigenous peoples, interaction of academic institutes with source communities and the development of collaboration. In Canada and the US these debates have proven to be essential for the development and maintenance of relations between academic institutions and indigenous peoples. Although for some time the European academic world tried to keep itself at a distance, the necessity to deal with these questions is increasingly accepted in European institutes too.
Strong, sustained, and mutually beneficial relationships with source communities are critical to universities and museums. The process of building these relationships is complex and requires mutual input. Depending on the source community in question, different solutions are called for. At an international level many research institutes such as universities and museums are now looking for ways to work with source communities in a framework of knowledge repatriation and other access-gaining practices. Knowledge repatriation can roughly be defined as returning information in the form of documentation such as pictures, statistics, documents, and archives that were once collected for scientific, administrative or other purposes to the community from which it originated. They are repatriated to be used by that community for their own purposes.
At a European level, only Denmark and England (to some degree) have been forerunners in this sense. The Dutch ethnographical museums have been lagging behind; some departments at university level have only recently started to think and write about these topics. The Faculty of Humanities, the Faculty of Archaeology, the Faculty of Social Sciences of Leiden University and the National Museum of Ethnology now want to develop new projects to share knowledge and cultural heritage projects concerning their American collections with indigenous peoples.
In an expert-meeting we want to learn from successful cases from Greenland, Canada and North America how such projects are best developed. In order to analyze and evaluate the projects, the museum wants to invite the leading experts in this field (indigenous as well as professional experts) from the America’s and Europe.
The experts-meeting is directly connected to ongoing Leiden University research conducted by Prof. dr. Jarich Oosten in Canada, dr. Cunera Buijs on Greenland; and research by Dr. P. Hovens in Native America and dr. Laura Van Broekhoven on Mexico the Dutch Antilles and Surinam. The results of the expert-meeting will be published and will result in the formulation of a project or program on Sharing Knowledge and Cultural Heritage.
On the first day of the conference several experts from the field will introduce the general topic of Knowledge Repatriation, Ethics and Politics. Each presentation will be followed by a general discussion round intended for Q&A and the exchange of experiences. It sets the conditions for building a dialogue and getting to know each others fields of interest. The second day is dedicated to the presentation of various case studies from the field. A total of nine cases are presented followed by a discussion round on the formulation of a strategic policy making for the university and the museum. The third day focuses on the re-formulation of a number of projects proposed by the museum in collaboration with the University.
| General Introductions to the topic (Open to external invited participants) | |
| 10:45 | Arrival and Coffee (Financial Matters) |
| 11:15 | Welcome by Pieter ter Keurs, deputy Head Research Department |
| 11:30 | Introduction by Jarich Oosten: Sharing Knowledge and Cultural Heritage |
| 11:50 | Personal Introductions: Who is Who? |
| 12:30 | Lunch |
| 13:30 | Gerard Persoon: Protecting Indigenous Knowledge Systems |
| 14:30 | Discussion round |
| 14:30 | Coffee Break |
| 15:00 | Jane Sledge: Respect comes in many forms |
| 15:30 | Discussion round |
| 16:20 | Visit to the exhibition When the ice melts, consequences for the Arctic peoples. Guided tour by Cunera Buijs, Curator Arctic |
| 18:30 | Hosted speakers dinner |
| Presentation on National Museum proposals on sharing knowledge and cultural heritage: North America and Suriname (Open to external invited participants) | |
| 09:30 | Arrival and Coffee + Financial Matters/reimbursements |
| 10:00 | Laura Peers and Alison K. Brown: Source communities and knowledge repatriation. The Oxford-Kainai Photo Histories Project |
| 10:25 | Franci Taylor: In Reverence for Kamryn's Great-Grandchildren: The importance of the 7th generation in American Indian Cultural Resource Management |
| 10:50 | Clifford Crane Bear and Lea Zuyderhoudt: Ethics and choices: Experiences at Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park |
| 11:15 | Coffee Break |
| 11:45 | Pieter Hovens: Sharing Knowledge: Opportunities and Constraints of the North American Department |
| 12:15 | Q&A and discussion of the project proposal |
| 13:00 | Lunch |
| 14:00 | Karin Boven: Sharing Cultural Heritage Suriname-Nederland |
| 14:25 | Samoe Schelts and Eithne Carlin: Cultural Centres in the Surinamese hinterland. |
| 14:50 | Basja Marius Merenke: Sharing our traditions |
| 15:00 | Andreas Schlothauer: Sharing Amazon Feather Collections of Europe |
| 15:00 | Coffee Break |
| 15:30 | Laura Van Broekhoven & Peter Duymelinck: Connecting collections; collecting histories, The Penard & De Goeje collection from Suriname |
| 16:00 | Q&A and discussion of the project proposal |
| 17:00 | General Discussion Round |
| 18:00 | Hosted speakers dinner |
| Presentation on Best Practice Cases from the America’s (20 minutes each) (Open to external invited participants, RGCC and MA/PhD students) | |
| 09:30 | Arrival and Coffee + Financial Matters/reimbursements |
| 10:00 | Bernadette Dean: It belongs to us. Sharing our Inuit collections in Canada |
| 10:20 | Leise Johnson: Speaking Images. The Jette Bang Greenland photo collection from Copenhagen |
| 10:40 | Coffee Break |
| 11:10 | Daniel Thorleifsen: The Greenland collections, Denmark and Greenland as sharing partners |
| 11:30 | Aviâja Rosing Jakobsen: The repatriation of Greenland Cultural Heritage from Denmark to Greenland. |
| 11:50 | Bernadette Driscoll Engelstad: Repatriating Cultural Knowledge: Curators, Elders and Communities in the Canadian Arctic |
| 12:10 | Lunch |
| 13:00 | Cunera Buijs: Related collections; Nooter’s material culture and photographs from East Greenland |
| 13:30 | Q&A and discussion of the project proposal |
| 14:30 | Coffee Break |
| 15:00 | Summary of Project Proposals and Policy advice to NME Museum |
| 16:00 | Closing |
| 18:00 | Hosted speakers dinner |
By Laura Peers, with contributions from meeting participants, 2008-06-27
I am reluctant to take this role when there are people here whom I regard as my teachers and mentors, people who have far more experience in hands-on work with indigenous peoples. Because I am a lecturer as well as a curator, though, I may be able to offer a useful perspective, as I am able to see broadly across the field of museum anthropology around the world and comment on it.
I want to thank especially Basja Marius for having the courage and determination to come all this way to this cold place to remind us that indigenous peoples have very real needs for access to their material heritage; I want to thank Samoe for his comments about the difficult realities faced by indigenous peoples, and Eithne for discussing the issue of endangered languages; Bernadette Dean and Franci for mentioning the poor health and socioeconomic conditions in which indigenous people live. We needed to remember, as we talked, that behind the topics and projects we were discussing were the paramount issues of cultural and physical survival of indigenous peoples. I also want to thank Cliff Crane Bear for telling Napi stories as a backdrop to everything else we have been discussing, and reminding me of the ongoing cultures that we are trying to strengthen. All of you have made it clear that the work we do between museums and indigenous peoples is terribly important.
The broad range of people here has made this a very special meeting: it is very unusual to have peoples from all across the Americas, including South America and different parts of the Arctic, together at a meeting. We have also gathered here many kinds of interests in museums and museum collections: staff from museums in different countries and different sets of experience working with ethnographic collections, conservators, curators; scholars who are not museum staff but who have worked with museum collections for a long time, who are compiling great knowledge of collections dispersed across many museums; and many indigenous peoples concerned with their culture and heritage. This has enabled us to think far more broadly about relationships between museums and indigenous peoples than many other meetings. I have found this meeting very heartening. In our own institutions and communities we can feel isolated and struggling to cope with various realities in which we all work; this meeting has been wonderful in bringing us together to support each other in the work that we do and to affirm that we are on the right paths.
The opening presentations in the meeting considered museums as closets of colonialism. We were reminded by Jarich NAME that repatriation is still sometimes resisted because objects are deemed to be important by museums, but we have later heard that objects are not always treated as important by the same institutions. How important are things when they have not been stored carefully, when they have been misidentified (often by continent), when records have not been maintained, when items are 'lost' when researchers come to see them? Sometimes it seems that ethnographic collections are more 'important' in museums as a display of the collecting culture's power to acquire and keep them than as objects of knowledge.
This conference has brought out a wide range of projects and by considering these, presenters reminded us that what is needed and what is ‘good practice’ can vary a great deal; we have considered the global distribution of indigenous peoples and the very different realities and priorities of these communities. The many languages and accents in this meeting have been a reminder of that diversity and have forced us to think more broadly about what is ‘good practice’.
We have considered several primary shifts in thinking within museum anthropology:
One of the most important themes across the last few days has been that of relationships becoming central to work between museums and indigenous peoples.
In thinking about these relationships, we need to bear in mind that some of us are trying to create new relationships between museums and source communities after a long period where they have often been very poor or nonexistent. We have heard here of community bitterness at the sense of being drained of knowledge and objects, at the fact that quite often nothing is sent back to the community by the researcher. We have discussed the need for new methodology, and for museum-based projects which address indigenous needs and goals, and we have noted how well research projects work when these dynamics are paid attention to.
We have also discussed how relationships vary across the local specifics of these projects. Remembering the diversity of experiences we bring to this meeting, it is apparent that the situation in Greenland is very different to that in North America or Surinam.
The agreement between Greenland and Denmark that their museums would share representative collections from Greenland, and that if Greenlanders wished the return of objects of importance for cultural identity, such wishes would be respected, is an extraordinary and unusual development. This development is based on extraordinary relationships based on respect in which, for instance, staff at the Greenland National Museum evaluate research proposals on human remains and objects curated and held in Danish museums. While it is probably unique, this Greendland/Danish relationship recognizes the fundamental need, at the heart of so much new museum praxis, for community access to material heritage and for control over its representation.
the need of indigenous peoples to have access to the things made by their ancestors to take knowledge forward into the future and strengthen cultural identity and community health; and we have acknowledged the right of the grandchildren of indigenous people now to their heritage and cultural identity
-and we have heard that historic museum collections can be instrumental to indigenous peoples in maintaining cultural identity; that museum buildings themselves, if designed by the people in culturally appropriate ways, can themselves teach cultural perspectives; Cliff spoke of the Blackfoot Crossing museum as being used to teach children how to be nitsitapi
-we have seen many wonderful outcomes of the development of new relationships, the addition of knowledge about objects flowing in many directions including back to the museum
We have shared ways of maintaining relationships across time: I have been so impressed by the number of speakers who have been working with communities for decades, who have referred to taking their babies with them, who have brought out pictures of their grandchildren to be admired: knowledge acquired within relationships across lifetimes, research undertaken while thinking of the outcome for grandchildren. For researchers, this is necessary: the relationships which are so crucial to the success of a project should not end when project funding does, or they were simply another form of exploitation. Honesty and personal engagement are fundamental to the respect required at the beginning of a project as well: as Bernadette Dean said, our elders are waiting to be asked. Despite poor relations with museums and external researchers in the past, indigenous people are willing to work together with museums if approached in the right way, a respectful way.
Relationships between objects and people comprised a second theme of the meeting. Franci noted one of the most important shifts in relations between museums and indigenous people when she said that objects are people, and can be animate, and are made and cared about by people. This move from seeing objects as things owned by museums with authority over them, to understanding them as social in nature, and having communities and descendants with moral rights over them outside the museum, is the fundamental and most challenging principle of new museum praxis. I learned that objects are social by working with Sherry Farrell Racette, a First Nations artist and historian, who was looking at stitching on very old metis coat and saying, I wonder why she did the seam that way? - I had never thought of attaching a person and a gender to a museum object before, had never considered the makers of these items as persons about whom one could wonder. Such perspectives are central, however, to indigenous peoples who are the descendants of these makers. As Jerry Potts Jr., a craftsman and ceremonialist from the Piikani First Nation has observed, working with historic artefacts is like having a conversation with the Elders who made them. Although these ancestors are gone from their communities, they can still teach through the artefacts they produced (cited in Brown 2000:191-192). What the ancestors can teach through the artefacts is not only technical skills, which are important in themselves for maintaining traditional gender roles and ties to land, but also the values and spiritual knowledge tied to those processes and materials, and the revival of cultural knowledge and social practices which may have fallen dormant or exist unevenly within communities.
Within such perspectives, museum collections are anything but dead or objects. The relationship between indigenous people and museum artefacts is not always joyous, however. There is another side to thinking of the people attached to things, which is grief. I was struck by Basja Marius’ response to seeing objects in museums: sadness at realizing he hadn’t known things were here, and a sense of discomfort at seeing things in museum environment and wanting things to be at home so his community can think about its culture and heritage and identity. In my own work at the Pitt Rivers Museum, I have seen many visiting indigenous researchers who have expressed grief when they see the old objects because they are reminded of how much has been lost from their culture and their community over time. Museum staff need to acknowledge this and support people working with these collections, including structuring research visits so they are flexible and give people time to process emotions.
In considering how to share knowledge surrounding museum collections, we need first to think of what knowledge there is to be shared. There is a lot of very basic work that museum staff need to do before working with source community members. Andreas told us of his experience working with collections that are poorly cared for in European museums, and Bernadette Dean’s account of how her great-grandmother’s parka was lost within a museum; sadly, the historic under-resourcing of museums has led to such stories being all too common. Many collections acquired decades ago have barely been unpacked; some are unaccessioned. Very few ethnographic collections have been well researched. NAME said that she feared that some 40% of the NMAI base data about collections is probably wrong, and I would suggest that this is also common. In UK museums, North American tribal artefacts are often misidentified not just by region but by continent. Pieter Hovens’ emphasis on doing basic research on collections history before special projects can start is absolutely right.
Sharing knowledge about collections also implies various forms of access to them. At several points we discussed the effects of the sociality of technology, and the different readings and responses one might receive from different cultures and generations when working with digital images or hard copy images. We also discussed some of the basic problems of sharing images, and the fact that only a very small percentage of museum collections have ever been photographed at all. Images and other forms of digital access have become key to what we do because they show the important possibilities of digital technology in making material accessible and in bringing together knowledge. We have heard about many website projects during this meeting based on a collection at a single museum, and these are very important for making material available. Perhaps even more exciting is the potential of the web for digitally reiunifying collections dispersed across numerous museums, bringing them together with related digitised records, and adding to this information community and museum knowledge about artefacts. Ruth Phillips’ GRASAC database ADD INFO is one such project which will incorporate tribal language terms, video clips of people making things, digital images of museum records and of the objects, and comments on objects from multiple perspectives. The GRASAC team contains a textile specialist and an historian who specializes in totemic signatures, several Aboriginal historians, and several museum-based researchers, and we all bring specialist knowledge to bear in our discussion of every single object we examine for the project, creating a cumulative record which goes beyond anything I’ve ever seen for museum collections.
Such digital unification can be across time as well as across culture; one layer or set of knowledge does not have to erase or obscure another as we add them together, but can exist side by side, a click away from each other. This is especially important for very old objects that have been in museums for a long time. At the Pitt Rivers Museum, we have parts of the 17thC Tradescant collection. Each of these objects has layers and layers of information and records about it compiled over three centuries, all contributing to the histories of those objects and of scholarship. These accumulated bits of knowledge suggest the sets of relationships involved in the making and transfer of these objects to museums: the people who were lovers across cultures, the colonial relationships involved, the people whose parents came from different peoples; it’s important to preserve those layers of meaning as we add or restore information to objects virtually or in any other way. This includes terminology which is now offensive, but which reveals the object’s history and the thinking of people about such objects across time. We need to find ways of explaining rather than simplifying. Quite often these layered, historical bits of information don’t agree with each other, but then neither have many of the people involved in the lives of these objects.
We discussed basic and fundamental aspects of sharing knowledge, processes which have become central to this new way we work: sharing information and images with tribal communities and cultural centres proactively, without being asked; making databases available on the web; doing basic publications on collections, and the need to publish in a language accessible to the source community. We also discussed, as a central part of the work of sharing, the need to link museum goals/agendas with those of source communities, in order to make projects successful. One other measure of success for such new ways of working is that they should be embedded across museum staff within an institution, not resting with just a lead curator, and that they should become embedded into institutional policy to ensure that relationships continue after the specific project ends.
Most of us work on a collection by collection basis to do the research, photograph and conserve objects, put images and information on the web, publish, and work with source communities. Several participants discussed the possibilities of this kind of work even when working under difficult constraints. We all mentioned funding problems of various kinds, including lack of institutional support for curators, lack of facilities to store objects properly. And it seemed that all of the delegates who spoke have done rather amazing things on low budgets, because few resources were available: we are a determined group!
Such pragmatic issues circled in many ways around the related issue of power and authority over objects and knowledge. This group would have no difficulty in stating that community members are often the experts on material heritage, and that source communities should have copyright and control over knowledge connected to material heritage: hence, NMAI decided not to photograph sacred objects, for instance, out of respect for source community feeling. These issues become a problem within museums over copyright of images and institutional belief in the scholarly right to control and own knowledge generated through research. Some researchers and some museums are, as Jane Sledge observed for NMAI, coming to grips with ability not to know everything—but this does not apply to everyone!
We also discussed some of the problems in the idea of sharing. The idea of ‘sharing knowledge’ is admirable in many ways, but needs to be thought through carefully. In many indigenous communities, knowledge is seen as contextual, traced to particular elders and transmitted to people deemed appropriate under appropriate circumstances: for these communities, ‘putting it all on the web’ is not appropriate. The very process through which research and sharing projects are designed and funded can also be deeply problematic. Mostly as museums we need funding before we can go to a source community, which means we start to create the structure and goals of the project before community members are able to bring their goals to it. Little wonder that Bernadette Dean said, ‘Bernadette Dean, I still don’t trust sharing knowledge sometimes’. Indigenous people have been betrayed so often by researchers who persuaded them to share, that sometimes projects may simply not happen because of a legacy of distrust or the failure of researchers to incorporate community goals into project outcomes.
The extent to which museums can share was also raised. There are also limits to cross-cultural relationships aimed at sharing. For the museum world, sharing means digitising, doing collaborative exhibits, and research; for the indigenous world, it means putting pieces where they belong, perhaps removing them from museums. Museums in Europe are generally not ready to consider repatriation. Museums need to build relationships with source communities in order to understand indigenous perspectives on repatriation. Cliff Crane Bear’s discussion of Glenbow Museum staff coming to see sacred objects as stored temporarily within the museum but needing to go home was most helpful here. We also noted that it is necessary to ensure that communities are ready for ‘sharing’, either of knowledge of or artefacts. Museums must wait for as well as respond to community requests; it is inappropriate to push things onto communities which may not be prepared or feel able to care for or deal with them
Cliff Crane Bear reminded us, very strongly, that one person can make a difference. He also said that nothing is impossible in this work, that trying is everything. Samoe spoke of choosing to work locally rather than at UN level: if the house posts are not strong, he said, the roof will fall in. Jane Sledge emphasized listening, and the cultural context of listening, as fundamental to respect within the work that museums are trying to do with indigenous communities. We were further heartened by the example of Greenland’s museums and their relationship with Danish colleagues, as a shining example of what can be accomplished based on cooperation and mutual respect. There has been a great deal of wisdom shared over this meeting, and it has been strengthening. It has also been challenging. As Franci said, there is no single answer or way or perspective about the issues being discussed. We must come to this work with respectful spirits, willing to flex, willing to do thing differently than we have before, willing to learn. I thank all the participants for making this happen.
