Museum collaboration and object return has been discussed and examined widely in practice and literature in recent decades (e.g. Fienup-Riordan 1998; Peers and Brown 2003; Basu 2017). This paper examines an instance of object return, a wooden bowl. The bowl was part of the Roald Amundsen/Gjoa Haven Collection held at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, Norway, and returned to the Nattilik Heritage Centre in Gjoa Haven in 2013. Upon its return to Gjoa Haven, the bowl became the focus of interrogations and discussions to determine how it might be related to local heritage and traditional knowledge. This paper explores how this particular instance of memory work might contribute to our understanding of the processes at play in repatriation activities, or, to quote Paul Basu, the bowl’s “entanglements of ongoing social, spatial, temporal and material trajectories and relationships, dislocations and relocations” (2017, 2) as seen from the perspective of Gjoa Haven residents.

In this article a story of digital sharing is told. The focus is on a collectionof traditional Inuit material culture brought together on King William Islandover 22 months in 1903–1905 by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. Today,shared interest in and concern for this collection centres the collaboration betweenthe Nattilik Heritage Centre in Gjoa Haven, Arctic Canada, and the Museumof Cultural History in Oslo, Norway. A digital sharing portal launched in 2017sets out to realise the space and framework for crucial collaborative practicesconcerning knowledge sharing and access to the material. The article discusses thisprocess, using Clifford’s perspectives on the contact zone (1997) as an intake todiscuss the construction and practice of this digital sharing site.