Indigenous Pedagogies in University Museums: Becoming Decolonization-Ready (original) (raw)
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Teaching Decolonizing and Indigenizing Curatorial and Museum Practices
Museum Worlds, 2022
Decolonizing and Indigenizing work needs to be done in museums and our day-today lives. On Turtle Island or so-called North America, the current settler colonial states add urgency to this work. Many settlers live on stolen land and benefit from colonial structures in ways that Indigenous friends, colleagues, and hosts do not. This article presents a self-reflective account of two museum studies courses I have been part of developing and delivering that incorporate decolonizing and Indigenizing principles. From my white settler perspective, I discuss the need for settlers to educate (or reeducate) ourselves as museum practitioners by putting decolonizing and Indigenizing words into conversation with our accountabilities in daily life.
Decolonizing: The Curriculum, the Museum, and the Mind
Decolonizing: The Curriculum, the Museum, and the Mind, 2020
'Decolonizing: The Curriculum, the Museum, and the Mind' tries to identify where we’re at and where we might be going vis-à-vis the idea of decolonizing – better, the process of decolonization – in higher education, museums and galleries, and the ongoing legacies of colonization that shape structures and infrastructures, policies and protocols, mentalities and behaviours, and minds and bodies. Co-authors: Danah Abdulla, Teresa Cisneros, Andrea Francke, Lolita Jablonskiene, Ieva Mazuraite-Novickiene, Achille Mbembe, Almira Ousmanova, Ieva Pleikiene, Marquard Smith, and Michelle Williams Gamaker.
Interpreting our own: Native peoples redefining museum education
1997
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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.
Displayed objects, indigenous identities, and public pedagogy
Anthropology & education quarterly, 2008
In this article, I describe how one group of student examines indigenous identity formation as dynamic and open to reinterpretation. Drawing on field observations and interviews with students in a 16-month ethnographic study, I examine how one group of students worked toward understanding how indigenous identity was determined by curatorial authority and historically defined museum practices. I argue that students can question the traditional pedagogical conceptions of indigenous culture that ought to be reconsidered within the public museum, and that working to historicize such conceptions makes more explicit student knowledge production of identity. [Indigenous, identity formation, pedagogy, public museums]
White Paper on Museum Futures, 2021
This white paper examines some of the bourgeoning tendencies in which settler-states attempt to make amends for their past wrongdoings through narrating their troubling histories and the way in which such phenomenon is reflected in exhibition-development philosophies and museological practices. I propose that situating Indigenous voices in national museums in settler societies is to re-inscribe and assert the indigeneity of a nation. Though such an attempt is far from uncomplicated. To demonstrate how this may be carried out, this document will present two case studies of national museums in two distinct settler societies: Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in the United States, and the National Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa.
Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, 2012
In museums with Indigenous objects, the exhibits present a particular representation of the culture and history of Indigenous peoples. More recently, the move toward partnerships with Indigenous communities represents a radical departure from long-held attitudes about the relationship between Indigenous people and museums. This article both examines the permanent exhibits at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian and uses qualitative data from visitors' experiences to explore the pedagogical nature of this museum's exhibits and the degree to which they challenge and confirm the public's conceptualizations of Indigenous identities. In considering the museum's pedagogical address (Ellsworth, 2005), this article suggests the need for educators to consider what is not presented in exhibits and the degree to which what is presented obscures new understandings from the visiting public.