CAG on museums: The Australia display at King's Gate

For the last month I’ve been working on another display to go up at Newcastle University as part of Cultural Development programme between the Great North Museum and the university. It has been another interesting challenge of time and coordination- not to mention that I’ve been running all over the UK to get in some research visits as well.

Boomerang, Australia (NEWHM 1999.H1755) 

This time around the topic of the display is Indigenous Australian material culture and politics. It has been much more fun working with Oceanic art and topics again as opposed to being slightly outside of my comfort zone working with the previous decorative arts display at the King's Gate building (Material Connections blog).

South Australian basket (B002)

Decorated emu egg, 19th century

Between all my other normal museum tasks there has been a manic push to select and photograph objects to get images together for the design team’s posters and interpretation panel design...

Western Australian shield (B056)

…pack and transport objects...

Packing the objects for transfer

…and find mounts for the objects among the museum’s many recycled past exhibition mounts.

Some of the objects were mounted by the paper conservators

Some objects are reusing recycled perspex mounts

Along with dealing with the actual objects, I have had to really sit down and think about the story line and interpretation that is available with the objects we have in the collection and what is appropriate to display. Several of the objects in the Great North Museum collections were at one point deemed inappropriate for viewing because they were sacred objects. Some were also deemed inappropriate to be seen by women. There have been a lot of issues with the restriction and regulation of Indigenous Australian collections over the years and the GNM collection is no different.

That is one of the major challenges of working with not just indigenous cultural material, but also with indigenous group rights who live in the settler nations of Australia, America, New Zealand, and Canada. Telling a story through historic objects can trap a living group in the ethnographic past, when you want to express a long cultural history, but also a thriving and continuing culture. If you’re in the Northeast the Australian display will go up in the King’s Gate building of Newcastle University on the 29th November and is open to all.

CAG on museums: Repatriations of human remains and cultural heritage

Germany is the newest country to join in the trend of museums repatriating human remains to the indigenous communities and former colonies from which they were originally taken. Last month the Charité Hospital in Berlin returned the skeletal remains of Australian and Torres Strait Islanders with a ceremony marking the occasion.

Ngarrindjeri elder performing ceremony at human remains repatriation Exeter 2008

Though repatriation has been a hot topic for museums since the early 1990s in the United States and United Kingdom, it continues to be a source of strife for the source communities who feel they are the cultural carers of their ancestors whose remains are out of their control and out of their homelands. In the New York Times article on this recent repatriation outcome, Torres Strait Island community member Ned David explained that the return of human remains provoked 'moving moments for indigenous people around the world' and 'there are mixed emotions, one obviously of relief…and then the moment is tinged with sadness for what was involved with the removal of the remains'. 

Drawing of a mokomokai from H.G. Robley's Moko or Maori Tattooing 

For people that don't work in museums or have contact with the community members who feel these repatriations are integral to their cultural identity, the existence of skulls and bones in a museum might seem like a normal part of the museum experience. The collection of human remains was often made in the name of science to explore archaeology, medicine, and the natural world sciences in general. Many western museums tend to agree that continuing to hold human remains no longer has much scientific merit, and each repatriation is considered on a case by case basis. For some items like tattooed mokomokai Maori heads, their open display has long been deemed inappropriate in museums in the US and UK and museums have returned these Maori ancestral remains relatively consistently.

Hoa Hakananai'a in transit

Other items of cultural heritage with associated political histories have a much harder time of being accepted into mainstream museum repatriation schemes. For example, Rapa Nuians (Easter Islanders) have asked for the repatriation of the famous moai Hoa Haka from the British Museum, but have not been successful with their request. Other famous cases have also been denied, and in general cultural patrimony will continue to be a difficult subject of negotiation for repatriation efforts in museums due to the fact that many situations of collection involved a set of power relations that do not reflect the present-day state of affairs. 

Parthenon Marble

If we were to account for all of these different power structures in the world retrospectively, the ownership of most museum collections would need to come under question. Of course, perhaps that is what needs to be considered in a postcolonial, postmodern world. Then again, I'm pretty sure I remember the V&A putting on an exhibition that said postmodernism ended in 1990 (http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/postmodernism/), but at least the acceptance of a case by case review is helpful to the repatriation cause.