Museum Collections and Their Legacies

Abstract

Museums continue to be cast as anachronistic—‘weary’, ‘tired’, and ‘out of touch’—trophy houses embedded in the colonial past, with object collections considered hollow remnants of that past. This article contests this notion and reveals how museums have emerged over the past fifty years as active field sites where Indigenous communities, scholars, artists, and artisans in the Pacific have been and are engaging with their cultural patrimony. This approach has seen new meanings and readings of, and new life breathed into, these collections in ways never imagined or anticipated. The museum is a space where differing epistemologies have engaged, conflicted, and negotiated, enabling the reshaping and recovery of meanings within the things held in collections; a process that sits at the centre of the current decolonizing discourse. For Indigenous people, these museum holdings are a unique and tangible link to the past that can perhaps be found only in memory. This article provides a nuanced understanding of the complexities associated with museum collections and their enduring legacies realized through the engagement of Indigenous people with their cultural patrimony.

AMSD: The Australian Message Stick Database

“…The limitations on in-person visits also reduce opportunities for communities to examine or photograph unprovenanced (or under-provenanced) objects with the aim of determining whether or not they rightfully belong to their Country. While this state of affairs will no doubt resolve itself when access protocols are revised, the current risk-averse policies means that progress towards a deeper understanding of the materials is stalled [48]. Moreover, Traditional Owners have an additional administrative burden when seeking access to their own cultural property and-in the case of the Australian Message Stick Project-have relied on non-Indigenous intermediaries to navigate the bureaucracy on their behalf.…”