Posts
Decolonization
Decolonisation: we aren’t going to save you
In today’s guest post, Head of Mātauranga Māori (Head of the taonga Māori collection) at Te Papa, Puawai Cairns (Ngāi Te Rangi, Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāti Pūkenga) reflects on what …
A Roundup of Decolonization News
The popularity of last week’s guest post by Frank Howarth on decolonizing the museum mind prompts me to share a round-up of some of the stories I’ve been collecting on efforts to decolonize …
Decolonizing the Museum Mind
At the heart of modern museum work is the tension between our mission to preserve the past, and a moral obligation to confront the bias and inequities entangled with that inheritance. The …
Confronting Canada
This article originally appeared in the September/October 2018 issue of Museum magazine. In celebrating Canada’s 150th anniversary, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights attempts to tell the …
A Conversation with Hallie Winter
Hallie Winter, curator at the Osage Nation Museum in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, is the recipient of the 2018 Nancy Hanks Memorial Award for Professional Excellence, which honors a museum …
The museum will not be decolonised
Sumaya Kassim worked with a group of co-curators to set up an exhibition at the Birmingham Museum of Art Gallery to help decolonize the history of Birmingham. “Decolonising is deeper …
A Canadian Museum Promotes Indigenous Art. But Don’t Call It ‘Indian.’
Canadian museums have added Indigenous art to their collections, worked with Indigenous curators and artists to ensure that their viewpoints are represented, and even changed the titles …
Keynote Speakers Donovan Livingston & Frank Waln
Award-winning educator Donovan Livingston and Sicangu Lakota hip hop artist Frank Waln explore what a decolonized system of education would look like and how museums can p…
Museopunks Episode 27: #MuseumsAreNotNeutral
With a reticence towards partisan politics, museums are sometimes perceived to be neutral institutions, many avoiding taking a visible stand on issues. But can they really avoid being …
Museopunks Episode 26: Decolonize the Museum!
The vision of the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, Maine, describes how the museum “will reflect and realize the values of decolonization in all of its practices, working with the Wabanaki …
Fostering Truth and Reconciliation One Generation at a Time
In his story for Museum 2040, Omar Eaton-Martinez posits a future in which the United States establishes its own Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to deal with the “atrocities and …
We must decolonize our museums!
“Museums can be very painful sites for Native peoples, as they are intimately tied to the colonization process,” writes Ho-Chunk scholar Amy Lonetree. Reading this passage for the first …