In this presentation, Igor Krunik and his research collaborator Martin Schultz (Statens Museer för Världskultur, Gothenburg), introduce a museum project, now in its fourth year, aimed to reconnect a major historical Arctic ethnographic collection with the local people in its original ‘home area’ in Northeast Siberia.
The project is named “Dispersal and Reunion” to emphasize how both the objects and the people have become ‘dispersed’ – the former among institutions, catalogs, and storage spaces, the latter via government resettlement policies – but could nevertheless be ‘reunited’ via museum research and outreach efforts of the digital era.
The objects at the heart of the project were collected among the Chukchi people of Northeast Siberia during the Swedish Vega expedition, Adolf Erik Nordenskjold’s Northeast Passage voyage of 1878–1879. It is a massive set of over 1,300 ethnographic items, archaeological specimens, photographs, and drawings, the largest among European museums and the fourth largest in the world. Since 1880, the collection has been dispersed across various Swedish institutions and museums elsewhere, including in Washington DC and Oslo, while local people were moved, resettled, and detached from their legacy preserved half-of-the-globe away.
The authors actively sought to engage Indigenous knowledge holders from today’s home communities in an online and eventual in-person survey of the Vega objects in Stockholm. Unfortunately, these efforts were put on hold, first by the Covid-19, and, later, by Russia’s recent war against Ukraine. Meantime, they continue to study elements of the dispersed Vega legacy in a context of post-contact cultural transitions that may be traced via comparison with other historical collections from this area.
The Museum of Cultural History in Oslo offers a promising site to learn of such transitions, thanks to its many ethnographic holdings from Northeast Siberia, from the Vega era and till the 1920s.