Museum Transformations

Nonetheless, in contrast to a conventional memorial’s erratic relevance and the advantages of the temporary exhibition, the pedagogic function of the conventional museum has also seen a dramatic rise in recent years. In almost every case where there have been gross human rights abuses, there is now a museum erected to honor the victims. In many of the histories represented the blame is less easily apportioned than, for example, in Holocaust museums, and this ambiguity complicates the process of remembrance. Where such compromises are acknowledged, however, the museum can become a site for healing and reconciliation. Smaller local or community museums have often been more successful in pursuing projects of reconciliation because they can be more responsive to the direct needs of those affected by legacies of violence. They are also freer of some of the bureaucratic obligations affecting large national institutions called on to accommodate broader constituencies, which can make it difficult for them to pay attention to the specific requirements and protocols that make reconciliation effective. On the one hand, the anonymity of a bigger institution can be helpful in providing a “neutral” territory for the disclosure of grievances; on the other hand, the associations of these museums with state sponsorship can dissuade the victims of violence from working with them.

In contrast, local and community museums in postconflict zones are adept at applying local knowledge of the ways retribution and vigilantism operate in their areas and are attentive to local power structures that could either exacerbate the violence or, conversely, contribute to its alleviation. In Kenya, Dr. Sultan Somjee, then an ethnographer at the national museum, worked with grassroots organizations to promote local forms of conflict resolution using elders’ knowledge of how material culture has historically been used to broker peace. The community peace museums he helped to establish all over Kenya were instrumental in initiating dialogue between ethnic communities whose historic antagonism to each other dates back to the colonial period, when the British and their Kenyan allies forced the removal and relocation of communities for strategic and economic benefit. Community museums are often controlled by those directly affected by the traumatic events that have necessitated reconciliation and redress: this is a critical factor in enabling successful resolution. In the case of the Lari Memorial Peace Museum in Kimende, north of Nairobi, 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 7of 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. 19The projects just named, furthermore, have been themselves subjected to lively critiques. In Chapter 22Paul 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. 20Another 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. 21Although 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).