Cunera Buijs is anthropologist and curator of the Arctic collections. Within the broader research interest of Indigenous peoples, her main research and extensive fieldwork in East Greenland deals with identity formation and representations, ownership and digital sharing, material culture, climate change, clothing and fashion in Inuit society. Cunera will talk about indigenous engagement in museums and Inuit research.
Collaboration and Indigenous engagement in research, whether or not it is connected to museums or research institutions, is valued at the background of historical and colonial relations of dominance and control. All too often the knowledge of Indigenous Arctic people was presented as non-scientific, romantic, emotional and contrasted with de supposed value-free science with methods such as verification and validation. The material remains of many Arctic Cultures can nowadays be find in museums on display in exhibitions or kept and researched in store rooms. Museums are criticized for being inextricably linked to the colonial past. Often collections are requested back, claimed by the related communities. Due to pressure from outside (and inside), museums in Europe changed their attitude and work increasingly together with Indigenous artists, scientists and communities in repatriation and designing exhibitions. What are the riddles of working with Indigenous counterparts in exhibition making? Cunera will share her experience with the Roots2Share project with Greenland (2010-2020).
Erna Lilje is Curator Indigenous Knowledge and Material Culture. She has a deep interest in ensuring that ethnographic and world cultures museums address their complicity and participation in difficult histories, such as colonialism and slavery, by being of service to those who continue to be most impacted by such legacies. Her particular passion is supporting the material culture-based research of indigenous artists, scholars and elders (not mutually exclusive roles). She has a background in the visual arts, museum studies and biological collections care and holds a doctorate from the University of Sydney. Erna will talk about museum collections as archives of materialised knowledge of and for indigenous people.
Though not new, there has rightly been an intensification of critique of world cultures museums in relation to their colonial legacies. In public discourse repatriation & return are posited as the go-to remedy for past wrongs. However, museum insiders are well aware that, for myriad reasons, return is not always desired by descendants of source communities or is not possible at the present time. This means developing and offering alternative positive actions to indigenous stakeholders. By framing collections as archives of materialized knowledge, and sources of historical reference materials, we can see how the museum can be of service to indigenous people and their respective objectives. Through case-studies we will see the varied ways people are making the most of museum collections to support activities such as cultural revival, knowledge and skills rediscovery and contemporary making.