Seminar series with Conal McCarthy, New Zealand

Learning from Māori museology: Indigenising and decolonising museums in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand

The museum, James Clifford reminds us, 'is an inventive, globally and locally translated form, no longer anchored to its modern origins in Europe'. In considering native and tribal interventions into museum practice, this paper book reaches beyond the western ideas that still dominate the literature of museum and heritage studies, and the experience of those parts of the world where these forms of collecting, display, community engagement and management are developing that draw on non-western frameworks? This chapter explores initiatives in two post-settler nations around the Pacific rim - Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand - where museum practice intersects with tribal cultural practices. In Aotearoa, for example, Māori concepts have reshaped the ways in which collections are managed, exhibitions are developed and staff engage with communities. My case study is the Rongowhakaata exhibition at Te Papa in 2017, the latest in several 'iwi' (tribal) exhibitions at New Zealand's national museum, which opened in 1998 with the mandate of being a 'bicultural' institution acknowledging two ways of doing things, including curation and exhibition making. The approach to developing this exhibition draws on customary concepts, and emerges out of a little-known history of Māori engagement with museum anthropology dating back 100 years. In particular this example demonstrates an intervention into conventional western ways of thinking about museums, exhibitions and curating, and presents a new, non-western, indigenous framework for curating, through a relational ontology that fundamentally reorganises notions of space, time and material culture around tribal ways of doing, being and knowing. By documenting the transformation of museum work through these different Māori approaches, this paper aims to 'recall' or revise museology. It argues, paradoxically, that the future of global museums and museum studies today lies in its histories of the local, or, as Māori ontologies configure it, that we must walk into the future while looking into the past.

Open to all and refreshments will be served in the staff common rooom (6th floor), courtesy of  UCL Centre for Critical Heritage Studies.

Links

Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa)

Photo: ©  Rongowhakaata exhibition, courtesy of Museum Te Papa