Throughout human history, the spread of disease has closed borders, restricted civic movement, and fueled fear of the unknown; yet at the same time, it has helped build cultural resilience. On 11 March 2020 the World Health Organization (WHO) classified COVID-19 as a pandemic. The novel zoonotic disease, first reported to the WHO in December 2019, was no longer restricted to Wuhan or to China, as the highly contagious coronavirus had spread to more than 60 countries. The public health message to citizens everywhere was to save lives by staying home; the economic fallout stemming from this sudden rupture of services and the impact on people’s well-being was mindboggling. Around the globe museums, galleries, and popular world heritage sites closed (Associated Press 2020). The Smithsonian Magazine reported that all 19 institutes, including the National Zoo and the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), would be closed to the public on 14 March (Daher 2020). On the same day, New Zealand’s borders closed, and the tourism industry, so reliant on international visitors, choked. Museums previously deemed safe havens of society and culture became petri dishes to avoid; local museums first removed toys from their cafés and children’s spaces, then the museum doors closed and staff worked from home. In some cases, front-of-the-house staff were redeployed to support back-of-the-house staff with cataloguing and digitization projects. You could smell fear everywhere.

Anthropology and its institutions have come under increased pressure to focus critical attention on the way they produce, steward, and manage cultural knowledge. However, in spite of the discipline’s reflexive turn, many museums remain encumbered by Enlightenment-derived legitimating conventions. Although anthropological critiques and critical museology have not sufficiently disrupted the majority paradigm, certain exhibitionary projects have served to break with established theory and practice. The workshop described in this article takes these nonconforming “interruptions” as a point of departure to consider how paradigm shifts and local museologies can galvanize the museum sector to promote intercultural understanding and dialogue in the context of right-wing populism, systemic racism, and neoliberal culture wars.

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Tracing the critical biography of Pedal to the Meddle (2007) – a Haida Manga intervention, originated by Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas – this article explores the biography of indigenized artworks that are generated as a site-specific form of institutional critique but later dislocated, mobilized and rearticulated in other disciplinary spaces. In its original context, Pedal to the Meddle was conceptualized and created to critique museum practices, the politics of ownership and First Nations’ dispossession on the Northwest Coast. However, when this artwork was dislocated from its site of origin and re-curated in other exhibitionary spaces, its indigenized critique, relational aesthetics and locational meanings were inevitably altered. It is these retellings, through the artist’s practice, different spaces, material configurations, collaborative processes and curatorial voices that constitute the subject of this article.

In the traditional indigenous economy of the Northwest Coast, copper shields were a highly prized form of material and symbolic wealth. In many cases, they were requisitioned by colonial authorities and became part of the ethnographic holdings of museums. Challenging this history of appropriation and keeping, Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas created a series of artworks, Haida Manga Coppers from the Hood (2007), for the exhibition Meddling in the Museum: Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. As site‐specific interventions, these Coppers were designed to subvert dominant narratives and practices that circumscribe ownership of cultural heritage and concomitantly suppress indigenous rights, epistemologies, and histories. This institutional or indigenized critique was not only evinced in the display and materiality of the Coppers from the Hood but also iterated and amplified in the “performative acts,” such as the First Nation speeches delivered at the exhibition opening. This article explores the interplay between objects and acts, between the tangible and intangible expressions of museum anthropology that not only index but also instantiate social relations, indigenous identities, intercultural histories, and the politics of ownership and belonging. I argue that through these types of material and performative expressions the museum can be understood as a “site of persuasion” (Dubin 2011:478; Morphy 2006:473), wherein indigenous peoples, including activists and artists, continue their struggle to reclaim and animate their cultural heritage, in old and new forms. [Haida Manga, performative acts, indigenized critique]