Museums as Duty-Bearers of Human Rights: Shifting Museological Practice and the Assertion of a Regulatory Governance Model (original) (raw)

Rights and responsibilities: American Indian collections in cultural museums

2010

The presence of American Indian materials in collections is an asset and a liability for museums, a dichotomy that is reflected in the collections management practices and interpretation within exhibitions. This project is a study on the development of institutional practices as a response to legal and ethical influences. The research primarily consists of a review of current relevant literature, personal interviews, and case studies on two institutions in the state of Oregon: The Museum of Natural and Cultural History in Eugene, and the Tamástslikt Cultural Institute and Museum in Pendleton. This paper offers a current perspective on these organizations and their unique collections and exhibitions, response to cultural resource laws, and interpretative methodologies in the larger context of the cultural museum field. White 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my family, friends, and eclectic grad school cohort for their support throughout the whole graduate school process. A special thank you goes to my mother and father for always encouraging me to do what I felt was right for me.

Legal, Equitable, and Ethical Perspectives on Heritage in Museums

Defining the Museum of the 21st Century: Evolving Multiculturalism in Museums in the United States (Chung, Yun Shun Susie; Leshchenko, Anna; and Soares, Bruno Brulon, Eds.), 2019

Even though museums are expected to be adaptive to changing global trends, in reality, they occasionally find themselves rather passive, defensive and resistant to change especially if such change is not driven by our professional community itself. A self-defining process under the leadership of the International Committee for Museology (ICOFOM) is reaffirming of museums’ raison d’etre. The contemporary definition of the museum is expected to aid us communicate effectively common attributes and core value of museums to policymakers, even in the absence of its legal force. It will also remind community members that museums are here to serve them with the highest level of professional integrity. Finally, the ICOM (International Council of Museums) definition will empower the entire museum community and unite the voices in its ongoing efforts toward building consensus in the areas of multiculturalism and sustainable heritage stewardship, which museums are entrusted to lead. This paper further elaborates on the foundations of ethics, equity, and international law, such as the Nagoya Protocol, and their essential influences that should be a part of the standards of the definition.

Anderson, S. (2019). Museums, Decolonization, and Indigenous Artists as First Cultural Responders at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. Museum & Society. 17(2). 173-192

Museum & Society, 2019

The Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) is part of a global movement of human rights-driven museums that commemorate atrocity-related events through exhibitions aimed at communicating a national social consciousness. At the same time, museums in Canada are increasingly understood as contributing to the perpetuation of settler colonial memory regimes through dominant narratives of national identity. Through the analysis of a unique exhibit titled Aboriginal Women and the Right to Safety and Justice, which relies on shared authority and nuanced Indigenous art form, this article explores how museums in settler colonial societies might represent difficult knowledge and act as sites of decolonization. The article posits that by breaking with conventional curatorial and display approaches, the exhibit serves to reduce the institution’s traditionally authoritative, nationalistic perspective and offers a model for enacting decolonization in museums across regions.

Museums and Restitution: New Practices, New Approaches (Tythacott and Arvanitis, eds.)

Museum Anthropology Review, 2015

One of the most far-reaching, systematic, and unsettling changes in museum anthropology over the course of the past four decades has been a shift in the perceived relationship between museums collecting materials and the source communities from which those materials are derived. In the minds of many museum professionals it was and had long been, for the most part, a close and collaborative relationship, in which museums curators served as advocates for and interpretive experts on source communities and countries. More recently it has become clear that these sources took a very different view, seeing the relationship as fundamentally exploitative, premised on profound disparities in power, and one in which the alienation of objects was based on coercion rather than freely given consent.

Centering the Human in Human Rights Museology

International Committee on Collecting (COMCOL) Newsletter, 2021

This article explains how an expanded understanding of human rights museology can help museums become more attuned with the needs of the communities they intend to serve and decolonize their practices. Developed in the early 2010s, the current definition of human rights museology remains mostly a theoretical exercise. Thus, this article proposes using a Human Rights-Based Approach to museum work as a starting point to shift the definition from theory to practice. Museo 360, a project developed by Museum of Antioquia (MOA) in Colombia, illustrates what this expanded and human-centred definition of human rights museology can look like in practice. By focusing on a peripheral approach based on strong objectivity, this article demonstrates that the definition of human rights museology can be more productively informed through the analyses of alternative practices developed by the marginalised groups which have been historically excluded from such conversations.

The American Museum: Fluidity of Ownership and Ambiguity of Legislation

Ownership is not always clear within the museum context. This is important as legislation can create clear boundaries, i.e. repatriation claims, but also present immense ambiguities. I will include a discussion of repatriation in ownership claims by presenting the legal requirements museums are bound to follow. This core issue of this thesis is: do institutions legally own all of the objects and information they house? I will address it by illustrating legal ownership is more nuanced and needs to be looked at topically.

Native Empowerment, the New Museology, and the National Museum of the American Indian (2014)

museum + society, 2014

The National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC ― the first national museum devoted solely to the presentation and support of the indigenous cultures of the Americas ― opened its doors to the public on 21 September 2004. This paper reviews the first, second, and third waves of critical response to the museum, in order to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the New Museology in an indigenous museum context. Two distinct tales emerge from these critical responses: one of Native empowerment, and one that centers on the museum’s display practices that are informed by the New Museology. These seemingly distinct tales are, in fact, tightly intertwined due to the impossibility of contradiction-free museum praxis when dealing with indigenous materials, as the case of the NMAI makes clear. I argue that embracing such contradictions could point to the next step in advancing indigenous-based museum practice, and in radicalizing museology in general.

Decolonising the museum? Dilemmas, possibilities, alternatives

Culture Unbound, 2021

As institutions that arose during the European age of imperial expansion to glorify and display the achievements of empire, museums have historically been deeply implicated in the colonial enterprise. However if we understand coloniality not as a residue of the age of imperialism, but rather an ongoing structural feature of global dynamics, the challenge faced by museums in decolonising their practice must be viewed as ongoing. This is the case not just in former centres of empire, but in settler-colonial nations such as Australia, where "the colonisers did not go home" (Moreton-Robinson 2015: 10). As a white, Western institution, a number of arguably intrinsic features of the museum represent a significant challenge to decolonisation, including the traditional museum practices and values evinced by the universal museum. Using a number of case studies, this paper considers the extent to which mainstream museums in Australia, Britain and Europe have been able to change their practices to become more consultative and inclusive of Black and Indigenous peoples. Not only this, it discusses approaches that extend beyond a politics of inclusion to ask whether museums have been prepared to hand over representational power, by giving control of exhibitions to Black and Indigenous communities. Given the challenges posed by traditional museum values and practices, such as the strong preference of the universal museum to maintain intact collections, this paper asks whether community museums and cultural centres located within Indigenous communities may represent viable alternative models. The role of the Uluru Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre in Australia's Northern Territory is considered in this light, including whether Traditional Custodians are able to exert control over visitor interpretation offered by this jointly managed centre to ensure that contentious aspects of Australian history are included within the interpretation.