we began – with a Northwest Coast masquerade performance, this time by the contemporary Git Hayetsk dance group.28 The group’s cofounder Mique’l Dangeli has explained the functions of their masked dances, past and present, as sites for transgenerational knowledge transmission and reflection on historical experience – roles that closely parallel those assigned to the modern museum. As an academic scholar, she has also researched the work of B. A. Haldane, a pioneering Tsimshian photographer who had a prolific practice in Dangeli’s community of Metlakatla, Alaska, during the early twentieth century. Although Haldane’s photographs document both community members’ accommodations of modernity and their resistance to the erasure of their traditions, his work had been forgotten in the late twentieth century (Dangeli forthcoming). Dangeli decided to restore knowledge silenced by the colonial archive in two complementary ways, one modern and museological and the other traditional and performative. In 2007 she arranged an exhibition of Haldane’s photographs at Metlakatla,29 and in 2009 she created the Visual Sovereignty Dance, centering on a new nax nox, or ceremonial being (see Figure 0.4):
FIGURE 0.4 Visual Sovereignty Dance performed by Git Hayetsk at Masq’alors! International Mask Festival, St. Camille, Quebec, 2013.
Courtesy of Mique’l Dangeli. Photo: Valerie Calusic.
During the dance four of B.A.’s photographs are revealed … The dance reaches a climax towards the end where the nax nox [masked dancer] creates new images by taking digital photographs of witnesses and the context of the performance. The nax nox turning the camera on to the viewers is a declaration of visual sovereignty in honor of today’s Indigenous photographers whose process of creation changes as new technology develops, all the while remaining deeply rooted in Indigenous visuality and ways of knowing. (Dangeli forthcoming).
The museum and its collections are, of course, key components of the colonial archive which has so often silenced the modernity and agency of Indigenous peoples. Yet it is also an essential resource for projects of restoration, and collaboration with museums has thus been integral to the work of the Git Hayetsk. By the same token, collaboration with Indigenous artists and researchers has become essential to museums as they seek to decolonize. The Git Hayetsk dancers regularly perform in museums so that they can revivify the “objects” and “artifacts” in the glass cases and on the storage shelves (Dangeli 2011). “Recently,” Dangeli has written, “we have become compelled to acknowledge the nax nox, those ceremonial beings who remain confined in museums and archives by creating new masks in their image to be brought to life publically with songs and dances” (2011, 44).
The effort we make to have our presence known, as living peoples and cultures, by dancing in museums aims both to disrupt the static nature of their display and to bring strength to our ceremonial beings, whose lives have been severed from the human interaction, sound, and movement that makes them and us whole. Further complicating our relationship with museums is the fact that, although our ability to engage with our ceremonial beings is stifled by the way institutions distance them from us, the willingness of museums to support our efforts (for example, by inviting our dance group to perform and allowing us to research their archives) contributes to my ability as a halaayt and Mike’s aptitude as a gitsonk. There is no doubt that the history of our cultural oppression permeates the power dynamics inherent to these relationships … our belief in and practice of nax nox and halaayt has the power to subvert the parameters of confinement of our ceremonial beings. (Dangeli 2011, 45–46)
Nax nox beings, Dangeli writes, “have the ability to bring change into the world – to strengthen, to defeat, to scare, to make peace, to give hope” (2011, 38). Her critique and the agency she claims for the Git Hayetsk dancers return us to the potential for transformation of the museum itself through its commitment to democratization and decolonization. Both work to reanimate histories that have been silenced, collections that have been ignored, and dimensions of cultural diversity whose disappearance has been prematurely declared. The move to transform museums is one that aims to establish new sites for mutual recognition, healing and knowing that acknowledge and respect difference and share authority. These processes are incomplete and subject to episodes of arrest and retreat. The gains that have been made are fragile. Yet the case studies set out in the chapters of this volume evidence important and precious steps that have been taken and trace a path whose permanence we must work to ensure.
Notes
1 1 Milestone exhibitions that raised the level of debate concerning colonialism and representation through the controversy they created would include Primitivism in Twentieth Century Art: Affinities of the Tribal and the Modern (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1984), Les magiciens de la terre (Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1989), The Other Story (Hayward Gallery, London, 1989), The Raj: India and the British 1600–1947 (The National Portrait Gallery, London, 1990), Into the Heart of Africa (The Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, 1989). A later example which is discussed in detail by Johan Lagae in Chapter 7 of this volume is Memory of Congo: The Colonial Era (Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, 2005).
2 2 Now classic critiques of the art and artifact paradigms include Redfield (1959); Clifford (1988); Vogel (1988).
3 3 Under threat of closure after the Dutch government withdrew its funding in 2013, the decision was taken to combine the collections of the Tropenmuseum with those of the Volkenkunde Museum in Leiden and the Afrika Museum in Berg en Dal and to reorganize the existing museum, possibly using the museum of world cultures model.
4 4 “250 Years On: What Does It Mean To Be a World Museum?” was a speech given by Neil MacGregor in January 2009 on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the public opening of the British Museum (MacGregor 2009).
5 5 The radio programs began on January 18, 2010.
6 6 See, for example, the catalog and critical reviews from the blockbuster exhibition, Africa Art of a Continent at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, which is discussed at length in Coombes (2001).
7 7 Initiated by the Mozambican Christian Council under the auspices of Bishop Dinis Sengulane, Transforming Arms into Tools was supported by the NGO Christian Aid. The BBC website claims that “over 600,000 weapons were surrendered in exchange for tools.”
8 8 Sophie Beissel, comment on “Throne of Weapons.” A History of the World in 100 Objects, October 22, 2010 (11:23 am). Accessed April 16, 2014. http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/97OnxVXaQkehlbliKKDB6A.
9 9 The signatories were the directors of The Art Institute of Chicago; Bavarian State Museum Munich; State Museums, Berlin; Cleveland Museum of Art; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Louvre Museum, Paris; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Florence; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Prado Museum, Madrid; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg; Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and The British Museum, London.
10 10 A very similar justification had been made in 1984 by David Wilson, then director of the British Museum, when in the face of heated restitution claims he argued that the museum’s political neutrality and its internationalism gave it the right to hold “material in trust for humankind for the foreseeable future” (Wilson 1984). See also The Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums, 2002, and, for an elaboration of some of the debates it provoked, Tom Flynn ([2004] 2012). The text of the Declaration is reprinted in ICOM News 1 (2004), p. 4, http://icom.museum/fileadmin/user_upload/pdf/ICOM_News/2004-1/ENG/p4_2004-1.pdf
