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Words by Michel Lee

Rewatch the Creative Study Lab 'Designing sustainable futures' panels

The Creative Study Lab was hosted by the National Museums of World Culture, Sweden

How Care and Sustainability Can Be Achieved through Repatriation and Truth-Telling

Shannon O’Loughlin (Chief Executive & Attorney) and Colleen Medicine (Program Director) (Association on American Indian Affairs, USA)

The Association on American Indian Affairs is the oldest non-profit serving Indian Country since 1922. The Association has built a national and international effort assisting Native Nations in the United States with domestic and international repatriation. The Association has been a national leader advocating for the repatriation of Ancestral remains and their burial belongings, sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony. The excavation and taking of Native Ancestors and burial items from their resting places, and the illicit trading and collecting of sacred objects and cultural patrimony is an Indigenous human and civil rights issue. Using a human rights lens, this presentation will look at colonial collection practices, truth-telling, and how reparations and anti-racism can create systems of care and sustainability – thereby generating relationships and healing.

Note: This short text describing the talk was written by Shannon O’Loughlin (Chief Executive & Attorney) and Colleen Medicine (Program Director) (Association on American Indian Affairs, USA9.


From the Community to the Museum, ethics and moral obligations in the care of Museum objects:

A case of the Women’s History Museum Zambia (WHMZ) in relation to Choma Museum in Zambia and the Ethnographic Swedish Museum Africa Collections

Victoria Phiri (Curator, Choma Museum and Crafts Centre, and Women’s History Museum, Zambia)

The background of the creation of museums in most parts of the world involved a collection of objects from their ‘home’ into a specified space that would house them, where they could be easily accessed by  visitors and researchers. In the case of ethnographic museums, the movement of most objects would be from communities in to this specified space that came to be known as a museum.

Once housed in the museum, the objects would now be under the care and to some extent ownership of museum personnel who are recognized as the ‘experts’ on the objects.  It is under this scenario that my paper discusses aspects of care of museum collections under museum custody by museum experts.

In most cases museum personnel regard the care of museum objects mainly in such terms as good conservation practices and provision of housing.  However care of museum objects can be much more than just that. Most of these aspects of care are centered on how, from whose point of view, museum personnel perceive the object. The community point of view on the object is often than not ignored by museum experts. What  seems to  matter the most to the museum experts  is weather the object is housed, based on  housing terms of museum experts; and also if the conservation measures, also based on museum experts’ terms, are applied. 

This talk will discuss some aspects of care from the point of view of communities, using examples from the experience observed during the Gwembe project. The Gwembe project, a pilot project by the Swedish Ethnographic museum and the Women’s History museum Zambia, to digitally restitute Museum objects of African origin, that are currently in the custody of the Swedish Ethnographic museum, back to Africa, involved engaging communities from where the objects were collected, to add metadata to the objects for them to be digitally accessible to users.  Pictures of objects were shown to the community of origin, who identified the objects, their importance in the community and the best way to preserve them for posterity.

Note: This short text describing the talk was written by Victoria Phiri (Curator, Choma Museum and Crafts Centre, and Women’s History Museum, Zambia).


Guelmiehdahke - a Sámi ethic of care

Liisa-Rávná Finbog (Department of Cultural Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo, Norway)

The language of kinship – the act of making your relations kin – is a basic principle in many Indigenous philosophies, expressing that the world is made up of an infinite web of relationships that expand beyond the humanocentric; generating ties that apply to everyone and everything, to things and objects, to land, to waters and other-than-human beings. In the Lakota and Dakota philosophy for instance, we find the ‘Mitakuye Oyasin’ meaning «all my kin» or «we are all related». In the South Sámi language we find a similar reflection of this duty of care in the concept of ‘Guelmiehdahke’, as the word takes on the meaning of ‘reciprocity in all our relations’. What these ethics teaches us is that we are already involved in and together with objects, other animals, living beings, organisms, physical forces, spiritual entities and [other] humans, and that the way to a good life – socially, economically, spiritually and in respect to health – is to care equally for all of these. In her talk, Finbog discuss how the guelmiehdahke materialize from this system of kin and more to the point, how the duty of care implied hereing enchance Sámi Indigenous knowledge systems [epistemologies] and concepts [methodologies]  within the context of museums and cultural heritage institutions.

Note: This short text describing the talk was written by Liisa-Rávná Finbog (Department of Cultural Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo, Norway).

The first talk on day one is available here on the TAKING CARE Project website here


sources

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8aKNv4qE53GLTW5_83HftQ