for example, the board members of the museum include both ex-Mau Mau combatants and their ex-Home Guard protagonists, and this is one of the strengths of the organization (Coombes, Hughes, and Karega-Munene 2013; see especially Coombes, ch. 2).
There is also, however, a role for large national organizations in processes of reconciliation. This role has been explored in settler societies in New Zealand, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere as they sought ways to respond to the contestations and activism of Indigenous peoples and to acknowledge the violence of their histories of internal colonization. During the late 1980s and 1990s new policies and laws were put in place mandating the repatriation of some collections and objects and encouraging new models of partnership and collaboration. In several countries, long-standing ethnology exhibits were redesigned and new national museums were created, making it possible to reconceptualize permanent installations of national history and culture. In Wellington, New Zealand, the new national museum, which opened in 1998, was founded on a formal bicultural policy that acknowledges both the country’s demographic diversity and “the unique position of Maori in Aotearoa New Zealand and the need to secure their participation in the governance, management, and operation of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa” (quoted in McCarthy 2011, 114). At the newly created National Museum of Australia, as Bain Attwood writes in Chapter 3, the histories of the massacres of Aboriginal people incorporated into the opening exhibitions survived the demands for revision issued by conservative critics after the museum’s opening in 2001. In Canada, the First Peoples Hall of the new national museum building opened in 2003. Its First Nations advisory committee orients visitors to the exhibition with strong statements about the continuing importance of land to Aboriginal people and their active participation in contemporary life (see Phillips and Phillips 2009). At the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, a new museum, the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), was opened in 2006 under Native American governance. Its opening exhibitions featured a series of modular exhibitions curated by Native American community groups.
Many European museums have also developed compelling exhibits exploring their colonial pasts, as represented in this volume by Mary Bouquet’s chapter (6) on Amsterdam’s Tropenmuseum and its reflexive portrayal of Dutch colonial history in Indonesia, and Johan Lagae’s discussion in Chapter 7 of an interactive digital experiment designed to give audiences a better understanding of the ways in which urban planning in Belgium’s colonial cities in the Congo structured social relations. While we cannot doubt the importance of such changes in modernist museology, or their influence in fostering a new historical consciousness and respect for Indigenous peoples, these processes are far from complete.19 The projects just named, furthermore, have been themselves subjected to lively critiques. In Chapter 22 Paul Chaat Smith, one of the curators of the NMAI’s opening exhibitions, discusses the reasons for his museum’s decision to redo them only a decade after they opened (see also Lonetree and Cobb 2008).
Changes in national museums have been paralleled by similar projects in regional museums. It is important to note that, even when changes of government cause national museums to retreat from revisionist historical projects, local museums have often been able to continue unimpeded. In Canada, as Ruth Phillips discusses in Chapter 24, the election of a conservative majority government in 2009 caused a major shift away from the national museum’s traditional focus on Indigenous people and its proactive pursuit of collaborative research and exhibition projects. However, in other museums the critical project continues. At Montreal’s McCord Museum of Canadian History, for example, a long-term exhibition on Indigenous clothing – historically a popular theme for exhibitions of Native American material culture – opened in 2013. While past exhibitions have tended to be celebratory of Indigenous innovation and artistry without noting the dispossessions and enforced changes of lifestyle that lie behind them, the McCord projects a large image of the text from the infamous 1914 Indian Act that specifically prohibits the wearing of ceremonial dress on the long wall adjacent to the opening section.20 Another large projection on the opposite wall shows a video of contemporary pow-wow dancers’ colorful regalia as evidence of historical resistance and contemporary revival. At Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum a revisionist diorama disrupts the objectified treatment of bodies and cultures typical of the twentieth-century anthropology museum. For the new Sovereign Allies/Living Cultures displays in the gallery devoted to Canadian First Nations, curator Trudy Nicks and her Haudenosaunee consultants decided to recreate the “Mohawk Family Group” which had been in view between the 1920s and the 1950s.21 Although twentieth-century Mohawk lived in frame houses, endured enforced residential schooling, and in many cases worked as high steel ironworkers, the original diorama represented them as living premodern lives in the imagined time of the “ethnographic present” (Fabian 1983). In the new diorama – humorous and purposely unsubtle – the mannequins wear fringed clothing and a sweatshirt advertising an exhibition on Indian stereotypes. The men wield electric drills and mobile phones and the woman aims a digital camera at the visitor (see Figure 0.3).
Similar changes have unfolded in South Africa since the demise of apartheid. Former national museums were obliged to reinvent themselves as meaningful resources for the majority black population, previously excluded from a museum culture which had negated their presence as actors in any narrative of national history by largely relegating black experience to the ethnographic domain (see Coombes 2003). In the two decades following the first democratic elections, new national museums have been built. Though a number of these have won international prizes, they have not always succeeded in attracting black visitors because of the legacy of exclusion which sometimes makes the concept of a museum unappealing as a location for staging revisionist histories. The fact that many new museums and heritage sites in South Africa draw in vast numbers of international tourists rather than local or national visitors has been highly contentious. Although many South African museums have worked hard to bring new relevance to their institutions, the most successful in obtaining the support and interest of local and national communities are often community run. One well-known example of such success is the District Six Museum in central Cape Town – a member of the
FIGURE 0.3 Recreated Mohawk Family diorama, 2012, The Daphne Cockwell Gallery of Canada: First Peoples, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto.
With permission of the Royal Ontario Museum © ROM.
Coalition of Sites of Conscience – which was created on the site of the infamous forced removals from that area.
The agency of the museum has also been invoked to support recovery from the broader and more pervasive losses of traditional knowledge that have resulted from often brutal colonial projects of erasure. In addition to the massive appropriation of Indigenous lands, in the course of six centuries of European expansionism and colonization, Indigenous populations all over the world have also been deprived of the basic human right to practice cultural traditions that has now been affirmed by the United Nations.22 In settler societies, assimilationist laws and policies forcibly suppressed Indigenous languages, spiritual beliefs, and ceremonies. At the same time, however, colonial practices of collecting – initially of curiosities and souvenirs and later of more systematically formed ethnographic and scientific assemblages – ensured the preservation in museums of language recordings, material culture, and other expressions of Indigenous knowledge. Museums, in other words, often hold the most important surviving documentation of historical Indigenous cultures and languages and therefore have the potential to serve as primary resources for projects of cultural renewal and restoration.
On a concrete level, recovery can mean the legal and physical repatriation of human remains and specific classes of objects. But on another level, recovery can also involve healing through the restoration of cultural losses and the psychic damage those losses have caused. Museum-based research and resulting
