These gaps in representation have led to the emergence of contemporary museum policies aimed at securing equal representation for all groups and cultures within the museum's exhibitionary practices.  Museums, according to Bennett, must be viewed in the context that culture was fashioned as a vehicle for the exercise of new forms of power. As such, institutions of high culture were enlisted by governments to civilize the collective population. More recently, the disciplinary power of the museum has strayed away from “civilizing” the lower classes and directed more towards instilling values of tolerance and social inclusion in a wider population. Museums, buttressed by contemporary global (UNESCO) and national governmental policies, continue to function as sites of authority in their own right, particularly on issues of cultural policy, including multiculturalism, postcolonialism, and sustainability within heritage sites, as well as the preservation of material culture. 

This paper will examine the current conditions of museum practices in the United States and Canada, in their pursuit of authentic representation and conditions for indigenous communities after centuries of cultural erasure and plundering. This paper will also look across the Atlantic to Palestine, which has been under the settler-colonial occupation of Israel for less than a hundred years, and examine how artists and curators have attempted to combat the ongoing destruction of Palestinian land and sovereignty within museum spaces. Traces of colonialism are, of course, present globally: in Latin America, Africa, the Caribbean, Australia, Asia, and the Scandinavian Peninsula. For this paper, the juxtaposition of North America and Palestine presents a unique understanding of decolonial practices, as I argue that Palestine is in the early stages of colonial anguish, with ongoing violence and denial of Palestinian sovereignty. In the United States and Canada, there is a strong movement for reconciliation and recognition of indigenous groups within museums. This is not to say that the mission to decolonize the museum has been a smooth, quick process without dispute, or that federal governments have fully resolved the long history of colonialism and its lasting effects on the indigenous peoples of America. In the case of Canada, the nation has detached itself from its violent colonial, imperialist legacies to create an image of a peaceful, multinational country. An extreme example of this was in 2009 when then Prime Minister Stephen Harper claimed at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh that Canada has "no history of colonialism. So we have all of the things that many people admire about the great powers, but none of the things that threaten or bother them." This selective remembrance of the past has downplayed Canada’s history of colonial violence towards its indigenous population. However, organizations like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission have made efforts to confront the government and institutions to rectify the legacy of residential schools, as a recent chapter in the country’s dark history, with the last school shuttering in 1996. 

The term ‘decolonial’ in place of ‘postcolonial’ identifies the persistence of the colonial state. As Ruth Phillips argues, in contrast to former external colonies, for internally colonized peoples there have been no definitive acts of political liberation, and no formal closure to the colonial era." Indigenous nations across North America and Palestinians both continue to seek resolution to displacement, dispossession and the absence of legal representation and self-determination. The artists and curators discussed in this paper stress the concept of survivance, a term coined by writer Gerald Vizenor (Minnesota Chippewa). Survivance "is an active sense of presence, the continuance of native stories, not a mere reaction, or a survivable name. Native survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy, and victimry." Perpetual resilience is what pulls indigenous voices and cultures out of a state of limbo and trauma theory into the discursive space of present and future Indigenous sovereignty. 

Museums and colonial endeavours are intrinsically linked to the erasure of Indigenous histories through the extraction of ancestral remains and cultural belongings. These impulses of plunder were spurred by monetary and territorial gain, notoriety, and the exoticizing of Indigenous cultures, and backed by racist and genocidal policies, practices, and beliefs. These impulses are still present today in institutions that take on a paternalistic role over the ownership, preservation, and care of cultural belongings and authority over the interpretation of Indigenous representations. 

Benedict Anderson wrote that together, the census, the map, and the museum had shaped the colonial state’s dominion during the nineteenth century. Museums, as an extension of colonial powers, have a history of classifying race through taxonomy, reflective of the racialized census categories found in state bureaucracies. The scientific language found its way into museum practices, as ethnologists collect ‘specimens’ and arrange them in ‘taxonomies,’ and conservators then ‘stabilize’ the objects and their environments. Anthropological notions within museum exhibitions connected the histories of Western nations to those of the Other, but only by separating the two, creating an interrupted continuity in the order of peoples and races. In this order, 'primitive peoples' are removed from history altogether, occupying a twilight zone between nature and culture.  Teutonic, Anglo-Saxon, American, and Oriental were common categories during the 19th century, while Black and Aboriginal populations of colonial territories were denied any space of their own, instead being “represented as subordinate adjuncts to the imperial displays.” Both groups were represented as cultures without momentum, as spectacles of ‘primitive’ handicrafts. As objects were plundered by anthropologists, colonial officials, and missionaries and placed into collections, their meanings and uses changed; they no longer served their initial purposes but were used as tokens for particular cultures and organized in certain ways to narrate particular histories and theories about the world. This dialectic constructs the primitive as premodern, static, and dead in opposition to the Western as modern, dynamic, and living. Leroy Little Bear (Blackfoot) observes that Western value systems rely on linear, singular, static and objective structures. Specifically, in museums, linearity manifests itself in terms of a social organization that is hierarchical in both structure and power, framed by static ways of thinking in which objects are viewed in isolation and within an artificial environment. 

Boris Groys wrote that a museum, unlike a cemetery, aestheticizes or de-functionalizes objects by exhibiting them, connoting the death of the object. While cemeteries are affixed with stories of resurrections and ghosts, leading to the possibility of return. Universal museums, despite all efforts to decolonize, cannot revise the foundations of their beginnings. To a certain extent, we cannot entirely rely on these spaces for the accurate and ethical presentation of indigenous culture and history. The very nature of a universal museum presents objects in static vitrines isolated from the public, valuing preservation over physical human bond with cultural artifacts. Metaphors of death are commonly used to describe museums and their collections among indigenous communities. For instance, in 1977, the Mohawk of Kahnawake in Quebec decided to establish a cultural centre rather than a museum, as they perceived the traditional museum structure as a hindrance to future cultural development and a barrier to the revitalization of tradition. The centre’s director stated that museums contain “‘things from the past that are dead’— they put under glass ‘things that no longer exist.’” 

Organizations such as the Canadian Museum Association (CMA) and the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) have conducted research and published resources in recent years to help institutions restructure their standards and enact and support Indigenous self-determination. Currently, Israel’s only museum organization is a subsidiary of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) and has not actively made any effort to acknowledge and develop standards for Palestinian collections. Museums such as the Israel Museum do not have a permanent collection of explicitly Palestinian art and artifacts; however, in their description of their Israeli art collection, events such as the Six-Day War of 1967 are depicted strictly from one perspective. The museum’s pièce de résistance, Reuven Rubin’s painting First Fruits, is described on their website as an “Oriental paradise, a place of harmony and fertility – the perfect setting for the birth of a new kind of Jew and the shaping of a native Israeli identity… The Arabs in the two side panels are essentially part of the landscape: secondary characters in this drama, they do not participate in the productive work that drives the world.” While museums in Israel fail to separate from the nationalist agenda, Palestinian artists and curators have looked outside of settler institutions to develop their own museums or a mimicry of one. Artists often have to find avenues to communicate the conflict outside of discursive traps that continue to interpret and produce the oppressive reality in Palestine. 

This paper will examine the work of contemporary artists such as James Luna, Rebecca Belmore, Joar Nango, Maria Hupfield, Emily Jacir, and Khalil Rabah. As well as museum interventions at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, the Royal Ontario Museum, the National Gallery of Canada, and the National Museum of the American Indian. Lastly, the policies and standards released by the CMA and AAM, as well as the application of laws such as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), will be examined to determine whether museums have successfully adhered to these regulations. 

By the mid-twentieth century, a renewal of activist energy, evident in the multiple and overlapping movements of the civil rights era in the 1950s and 1960s, raised questions about what constitutes service and representation in museums. While that question was being addressed in cultural centres and artist co-ops, founded, managed, and maintained on reservations as a declaration of Indigenous sovereignty, by the 1980s-90s, groups began to lobby for legislation and policy to protect the art, heritage, and culture of indigenous artists who reside in present-day Canada and the United States.1992 marked both the Columbus Quincentenary and the 125th anniversary of the Confederation of Canada, launching into debates about misrepresentations in history and national identity, witnessed in a series of public opinion and political articles submitted to major news outlets. Multiple museums held exhibitions and programs about indigenous peoples to curb the colonial past and present, contesting the ethos of the imaginary Indian that evolved through harmful and stagnant displays of indigenous objects within major museums.

Museological Mimicry

James Luna (Payómkawichum/Luiseño) famously stated, “Call me in ‘93,” after being asked to participate in countless exhibitions that year, challenging curators to extend their temporary goodwill gesture into a lasting, genuine relationship. Luna’s practice is grounded in confronting the limitations of art history in constructing whiteness and the Other. His performance piece, Artifact Piece, confronts the history of collecting, spectatorship, and Native-settler relationships and stereotypes within the museum context. Recalling Groys’s comparison of the museum to a cemetery, Luna presents himself as a part of "dead" Native cultures, confronting the voyeuristic museum visitor. 

The performance was staged at the San Diego Museum of Man, which houses a photograph of Luna’s great-grandmother, Maria Soledad Apish Trujillo, taken by ethnographer Constance Goddard DuBois in 1906. The setting of this performance is crucial, as Luna links ethnographic interest in his ancestors to the continued Western epistemological obsession with archiving the Other. Lying still, wearing a breechcloth in a sand-filled museum display case, Luna’s body is framed by violating labels, for instance, one indicates that his scars are from “excessive drinking.” Nearby vitrines contained objects and ephemera specific to Luna’s life, including his divorce papers and Motown collection. Luna described the installation in 2018:

I had long looked at representation of our peoples in museums and they all dwelled in the past. They were one-sided. We were simply objects among bones, bones among objects, and then signed and sealed with a date. In that framework you really couldn’t talk about joy, intelligence, humor, or anything that I know makes up our people...

The installation took objects that were representational of a modern Indian, which happened to be me, collecting my memorabilia such as my degree, my divorce papers, photos, record albums, cassettes, college mementos. It told a story about a man who was in college in the sixties, but this man happened to be native, and that was the twist on it.

The performance also spoke to the live displays of Native people in World’s Fairs, such as the group of Kwakwakw'wakw who lived in a plank house at the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition in 1893. Performance art breathes life into the stagnant notions of the indigenous individual. It disrupts the Western fantasy of the ‘vanishing race,’ as audiences often paradoxically view Native performers as part of a fleeing culture, despite the performers’ physical presence.

Rebecca Belmore (Anishinaabekwe) also utilized her body to direct her museum intervention. Her performance, Artifact #671B, was a response to the controversial exhibition “The Spirit Sings,” held at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary in conjunction with the 1988 Olympic Games. The exhibition was criticized for a lack of consultation with indigenous groups or curators, the show featured stolen artifacts, and their main sponsor, Shell Canada, was at the time drilling in the Lubicon region in northern Alberta, creating lasting health problems for the local community of the Lubicon Lake Cree Nation. Belmore travelled to Thunder Bay Art Gallery in Ontario to coincide with the passing of the Olympic torch through the town. Donning a vest with the Shell Oil logo on her chest and an inverted Canadian flag on her back, the artist displayed herself as a museum specimen, sitting within a wooden frame that echoed the contours of a museum display case. Yet she tied her presence as an Indian artifact to a world outside the museum, to the loss of land and struggles for agency, to the infiltration of corporate multinationals into Aboriginal cultural affairs. Jolene Rickard noted, "Belmore's body has always been a decolonizing zone.” 

Examining the performances of James Luna and Rebecca Belmore, the presence of the indigenous body both inside and outside the museum rejects the notions set by colonial powers of what it means to be native. Luna’s Artifact Piece, though visually appealing in relation to the concept of the Other, by placing himself in the ethnographic context where his ancestors are archived, his insertion of parody distorts museological practices. It provokes the spectator to reevaluate and question the representations of indigeneity. Belmore, on the other hand, utilizes the museum setting to address larger issues related to the ongoing plundering and destruction of present-day communities. By mimicking the display of indigenous bodies, Belmore acknowledges the problematic entities, like Shell Canada, participating in ‘redwashing’ tactics in museum spaces. Their sponsorship of The Spirit Sings was purely performative, as they simultaneously ruined the quality of life and land of the Lubicon Lake Cree Nation.

To question configurations of power and authority, mimicry is a reliable process of deconstructing, adapting and rerouting, rather than solely adopting, aspects of institutional agency. The act of museological mimicry, seen in the two works above, can also be extended outside the museum when institutions refuse to provide a space for contention and even inclusion. Khalil Rabah’s The Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind (PMNHH; 2003-ongoing) is an example of this, as evident in its self-description: “exiled at home, and everywhere abroad.” The PMNHH is a semi-fictional museum that adopts the taxonomical practice of universal museums, including Earth and Solar System, Anthropology, Geology and Paleontology, and the Botanical departments. 

Rabah’s employment of mimicry in this context does not point out the discrepancies between real and fictional constructions of indigeneity, but rather by mimicking the agency and authority of an institution, Rabah enacts the cultural infrastructure of a not-yet-actualized Palestinian state.  Utilizing the apparatuses of the art world, including research, artifacts, vitrines, newsletters, captions, collections, archives, design and display methodologies, and methods of knowledge production and transfer, can potentially provoke a reality and bring it into being through mimesis.

The Lowest Point On Earth Memorial Park, 2017, was a multimedia installation of the Earth and Solar System department, addressing how the Israeli state has weaponized climate change in the ongoing occupation. His Dead Sea and 93%-95% point to water recession in areas of the Dead Sea that were conceded to the Palestinian Authority, as the allotted space was expected to dry out within a few decades, leaving behind barren salt-poisoned lands. Rabah utilizes the museological display of the natural sciences to understand the relationship between settler colonialism and the land, drawing on the work of Eyal Weizman, Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, and his inquiry into how natural cycles mobilize political processes and ideologies. Rabah began the project in 2003, thirteen years before the inauguration of the Palestinian Museum in Ramallah, the first national museum for Palestine. Anthony Downey raises the question, “To what extent did Rabah's project proleptically predict - through the functioning of mimetic projection - the manifestation of such an institution in all but name?” 

The PMNHH expands the possibilities of museum techniques, as Chiara De Cesari refers to the accumulation of material that has emerged from the project as a “plastic assemblage” of objects, bodies, and institutions. The galleries, spaces, museums, and biennials hosting the PMNHH, along with the various devices and technologies, have enabled the project to come to fruition. It is the project’s consistent, paced mocking of standard museum routine and devices across varied iterations that permits a sense of institutional unity and stability.  Through the displays of the PMNHH, Rabah engages with real, pressing questions of institutions and institution building under conditions of colonialism, oppression and statelessness. Rabah’s use of mimicry also recalls Homi K. Bhabha’s notion that the Other’s mimicry of colonial practices is a form of presence: “we identify ourselves with the other precisely at a point at which he is inimitable, at the point which eludes resemblance.” The PMNHH gains agency by negotiating its authority through a repetitive process of “unpicking” museological practices and relocating into new spaces. 

Similar to native artists in Canada and the United States questioning the sincerity of institutional promises of reconciliation and sovereignty, Palestinian artists like Rabah, born in Jerusalem in the same year as the Naksa (1967), or the 'day of the set-back', examine the lasting impacts of events like the Oslo Accords in 1993/1995. Its subsequent failure of both peace for Palestinians and a state built by the Palestinian Authority (PA) raises the question: what viable and emancipatory institutions should be built for Palestine? 

Decolonial Policies and Loopholes

Although there are no federal laws in Canada related to repatriation, efforts by museums to return artifacts have occurred sparingly. The Canadian Museum of History returned medicine bundles to the Tsuut’ina Nation in 1989, and the Six Nations Confederacy’s wampum belts in 1991. “The Spirit Sings” exhibition highlighted the shortcomings in museum practices regarding indigenous culture and objects. In response, the Task Force on Museums and First Peoples was established, a national body comprising over 25 individuals from the Indigenous and museum communities. In 1992, the Task Force released a report that established guidelines for repatriation and formulated specific recommendations for professional training of Indigenous curators and support for contemporary artists. However, in 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada released their Calls to Action, noting the little progress that had been made since the Task Report was released. The Canadian Museums Association was tasked with delivering a report and recommendations as part of a national review of museum policies and their adherence to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). UNDRIP is a legally non-binding resolution adopted by the United Nations in 2007, which establishes a universal framework of minimum standards for the survival, dignity, and well-being of Indigenous Peoples worldwide. The CMA released its report, "Moved to Action in 2022," which includes standards for implementing the UNDRIP and supporting Indigenous self-determination in museums. These standards encompass repatriation, indigenous hiring initiatives, and fostering lasting, genuine relationships with communities outside the museum. Moved to Action included data from their 2019 survey of 300 participants, which found that 73% of museums featured Indigenous-specific curriculum and programming, yet only 32% had Indigenous staff. Alarmingly, only 10% of museums included in this research have a reconciliation or repatriation policy, and 10.5% have an Indigenous Advisory Committee as part of their overall governance structure.

In 1990, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was enacted by the United States federal government to repatriate ancestors, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony to the tribes to which they are related. Although the progress toward return has been slow in recent years, with legal revisions, institutions such as the American Museum of Natural History and Colgate University have repatriated thousands of objects and remains to their associated tribes. With vague terminology and definitions, loopholes in the system have allowed institutions to refuse repatriation efforts. Notably, the Peabody Museum at Harvard University exploited the CUI or “culturally unidentifiable” category to avoid complying with the law and the pleas made by impacted communities, longing for healing and a proper burial for their ancestors. CUI is designated to a collection, human remains, and associated funerary objects when extensive research cannot identify their history and provenance.  This push and pull of NAGPRA is what Rae Gould coins as ‘institutional will’ (the genuine desire to comply with the law) versus ‘retentive philosophy' (the desire to retain collections for scientific purposes). Universities are in the business of research; thus, their reluctance to return ancestral remains stems from the fear of losing scientific knowledge. Defining pre-contact ancestors and artifacts as CUI continues a long history of colonization and historical erasure of Native American peoples; it privileges a particular type of authority to make that designation at the expense of other authorities, often Native, who might offer an alternative view.

The act of retention is ongoing in Israel regarding Palestinian property and remains, with no promise of repatriation in sight. Emily Jacir (Bethlehem) chose for her contribution to documenta 13 to examine the classification of looted objects by state apparatuses. ex libris comprises an installation, a public billboard project, and a publication. The installation, originally shown at the Zwehrenturm of the Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany, and later exhibited at Alexander and Bonin in New York, comprises 178 photographs Jacir took of 6,000 books labelled 'Abandoned Property,’ held at the Jewish National Library in West Jerusalem. 70 to 80,000 books were looted from the homes and libraries of Palestinians in 1948 when the state of Israel was established, to erase any evidence of Palestinian history, as Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, wrote, “to ensure they [the Palestinians] never do return. The old will die and the young will forget.” Over the span of two years and multiple visits to the library to which the vast majority of Palestinians have no access, Jacir photographed these books with her mobile phone. Jacir focuses on the traces of the books’ former owners, zooming in on, for instance, one bearing the handwritten Arabic inscription that translates to, “This belongs to Adel al Turman. / Second year of commerce. / 3 March 1924.” Ex libris exposes the contradictions within these classifications; the A.P. written in pencil on the title pages and in ink on the book spines contrasts with Palestinian inscriptions and personal marks. In 2014, Jacir painted one of the found inscriptions on the side of a building in Manhattan that reads in both Arabic and English, “This book belongs to its owner, Fathallah Saad. He bought it with his own money at the beginning of March 1893.” The billboard, AP 3852, is still up and is in the peripheral view of those walking on the High Line in Chelsea. The books form an archive documenting historical ownership and Palestinian possession that, far from being erased, is preserved by the Israeli state. Settler-colonial states, as we have seen in Canada, the United States and Israel, weaponize laws and policies to separate and sort people into frames of meaning to maintain a narrative that justifies the oppression of people and the seizures of their lands. 

During her visits to the Jewish National Library, Jacir was simultaneously researching the Mamilla Cemetery in Jerusalem. The cemetery was declared a historical site and later an antiquities site during the British Mandate. Rachel Nelson points out the parallel between the ex libris installation and the cemetery, as the rectangular, grayscale prints lined up on shelves eerily resemble tombstones in a vast plain. The cemetery, which dates back to the 7th century, was wrecked in 1948, with graves unearthed and tombstones plucked by the occupation to be repurposed as building material. The cemetery is now the site of the Museum of Tolerance, designed by Frank Gehry, with its mission to “promote tolerance and human dignity, the museum shares lessons from world history and universal Jewish values, while creating a powerful dialogue between individuals from all cultures and religions.” Despite petitions and protests, Israel's Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that the Mamilla Cemetery, after fifty years of disuse, could be regarded as abandoned. Important to note that since 1948, the cemetery has been under Israeli ownership, and the Israeli Electricity Company had already excavated the site to lay cables and converted it into parking lots and a part of Independence Park. The word ‘abandoned’ returns again to justify new violence and lootings. The case studies of the National Jewish Library and Mamilla Cemetery reflect James Baldwin’s idea of a genocidal history, “... a vision as remarkable for what it pretends to include as for what it remorselessly diminishes, demolishes or leaves totally out of account.” Ex libris, by archiving tombstones and tomes, reveals the irony that is lost in the blinding state policies that make sense of building a museum of tolerance on and out of the remains of Palestinians.

Monoethnic Museums

The mission to decolonize museums can bring significant progress to already established institutions; however, the aim for marginalized groups and cultures to have their voices heard and continuously supported often finds itself in identity-designated spaces. Examples of these institutions include the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), Woodland Cultural Centre, Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, and the Palestinian Museum. The NMAI in New York was previously known as the Museum of the American Indian, which was formed from the private collection of wealthy businessman George Heye. He controlled the museum's logistics until his death in 1957. Today, the museum, which holds one of the largest collections of American Indian objects in the world, is directed and managed by Native American professionals. During its transitional stage in the 1990s, David Bunn Martine, (Shinnecock/Montauk, Chiricahua Apache) a curator and artist, was hired to assist in handling, transporting, and storage of about 45,000 objects. Martine recalled his time at the NMAI as a challenge; the atmosphere was dense with forced cultural shifts, including a large influx of indigenous staff and the museum being forced to return objects to the tribes from which they came. The concept of spirituality is significant to address in the context of indigenous materials, as Martine describes “I personally feel that society at large has lost the feeling of the sacred in whatever belief system they might subscribe to; therefore, I was not really surprised but disheartened at the lack of such appreciation of the sacred when dealing with the Indian materials in this institutional setting.” Martine’s experience of working with non-Native staff members who defended a scientific, apathetic approach when handling these objects led to strained relationships between staff—looking at how the work environment during the NMAI’s new beginnings, we are left with a more nuanced, realistic understanding of what entails the inclusion of indigenous curators, cultural workers, and other museum staff in already predominantly white spaces. As many museums and their regional associations (i.e., CMA) acknowledge the need for more indigenous voices, there also needs to be continued support after the hiring process, reflective of Gould’s institutional will. In terms of exhibition revisions, the NMAI is actively working to recontextualize their displays. In 1995, there was a vacant space where Plains medicine bundles used to be displayed, with a printed card nearby that read: 

Sacred/Sensitive Objects. The museum is contacting tribal elders and traditional leaders to discover what the appropriate and sensitive methods are for storing, handling, displaying and interpreting objects in its collections. The effects of these discussions... will be evidenced by new labelling, display techniques and in some cases the actual removal of objects from display... We hope that our efforts to “relearn” the methods used to display the museum’s collections will provide truer insights into the cultures and traditions represented in our exhibit.

This sign is a sign of life, not death, and the beginning of a new era of ‘relearning’ for museums and their staff. 

Following the closure of the Mohawk Institute in 1970, the Woodland Cultural Centre (WWC) opened on the site in 1972. Mohawk Institute was the oldest residential school in Canada, as its doors opened in 1831. Today, the WWC, directed by the Association of Iroquois and Allied Indians, works to preserve, promote and strengthen Indigenous language, culture, art and history; bringing the story of the Hodinohsho:ni people of the Eastern Woodlands to the public through exhibitions, archives and programs. The Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Museum and Research Center (MPMRC) opened in 1998, with the mission of educating the public about the Native histories of survivance in New England. Both the NMAI and WWC rely on government funding to continue their work; however, MPMRC is tribally owned and managed, with its operating budget heavily subsidized by the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation’s casino-based economy. The museum’s independence from government authority has enabled more radical approaches to decolonizing history, particularly in emphasizing community engagement and collaboration. MPMRC collaborates with the public, tribal members, archaeologists, and other stakeholders to foster ongoing dialogue on social justice, exhibition and program planning, and stewardship – all of which are integral to the preservation and heritage of the past. By adhering to a co-creative methodology, the museum rejects the colonial notion of the universal museum, as described by Bennett, which is an instrument of public instruction where the lower class becomes civilized by modelling their behaviour on that of the middle class. Instead, visitor experiences are less directed and more open to exploratory learning and social interaction; as Eileen Greenhill Hooper points out, the universal museum methodology is defined by division between the private space, where the curator (as the expert) produces knowledge, and the public space, where the visitor consumes said products. This develops an atmosphere of ignorance for both parties, as the visitor is unaware of the curator's work and the curator is unaware of the visitor's reactions and responses. Instead, the co-creative methodology employed at MPMRC adjusts the role of the curator from a dispenser of knowledge to a facilitator of learning.

The Palestinian Museum, inaugurated in 2016, was originally conceived as a ‘memory museum’ by anthropologist Ibrahim Abu Lughod with the support of the Palestinian Welfare Association in the 1990s, a decade that was defined by the failure of the Oslo Accords, the onset of the Second Intifada, and the ongoing siege of Gaza. The museum, from its conception, was subject to debates centred on issues of geographical placement, collection policy, and its relationship to the ‘national’ museum in the absence of a sovereign state. The museum opened without a permanent collection, and as a response, Israeli newspapers claimed the museum was empty because the “Palestinians did not possess any material history to showcase.” These claims were then echoed by Western news outlets in a chain reaction, as the New York Times published “Palestinian Museum Prepares to Open, Minus Exhibitions,” determining that the institution’s void was a failure and possibly due to “Palestinian cultural and social initiatives have often failed to gain traction and find consistent leadership.” However, there were objects on display in the hall, and the NYT even printed photographs of the exhibits. Lara Khaldi, curator and critic, fascinated by this temporary blindness of the public, concluded that this phenomenon was an act of resistance. As a museum that is representative of Palestinian History, the history of struggle against colonialism has not ended. If the audience acknowledged the objects in the exhibition hall, it would signal the end (or death) of emancipation. 

Exhibitions and Revisions 

Looking towards national, universal museums and their efforts to decolonize their museological practices, we can examine the changes in permanent and temporary exhibitions. With the rise of temporary, indigenous-centric exhibitions, a sense of caution has arisen among represented communities regarding the intent behind these projects. As Lindsey Nixon points out, there is a colonial drive to consume Indigenous culture as a form of conservation liberalism, wherein non-Indigenous patrons attempt to counteract potentially colonial forms of politics – collecting, exhibiting, and curating – by making space for limited Indigenous representation for short periods of time and in segmented parts of the art industry. Recalling James Luna and his motto, “Call me in ‘93,” the enactment of decolonization within institutions cannot be temporary and isolated; it must come with permanent restructuring to make sense of Indigenuity and provide lasting support for self-determination and sovereignty for actual communities. It must extend beyond recognition, implying that nothing more is required beyond a simple acknowledgment of identity and existence.

In the 2010s, the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto revised its two galleries dedicated to Canadian history – the Gallery of Canada and the Gallery of Canada: First Peoples. The First Peoples gallery exhibits artifacts from the museum’s ethnographic collections, organized by different geographic cultural areas, with an emphasis on particular collectors and historical practices of collection, as well as ideas about indigenous culture. The gallery features a significant area dedicated to temporary exhibitions of contemporary Indigenous art and a small display case of objects curated by the gallery’s six Aboriginal advisers. Notably, the ROM recontextualized Benjamin West’s The Death of General Wolfe (1776). The museum has added a video installation discussing the painting's significance and an interpretive text panel presenting three diverse perspectives that challenge the visitor to reconsider what the painting might represent as a symbol of Canadian identity. The Death of General Wolfe is an imaginative depiction of Major-General James Wolfe’s death at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759. It shows Wolfe dying on the battlefield surrounded by soldiers, an Aboriginal warrior forming a part of this group. One of the perspectives is by Iroquois/Onondaga artist, curator, and cultural critic Jeff Thomas, who discusses the figure of the Aboriginal warrior in the painting. 

Àbadakone | Continuous Fire | Feu Continuel (2019-2020) was held at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and was conceived as a dialogue between audiences, artists, curators and critics about contemporary Indigenous art-making in Canada and globally. The title was gifted to the gallery by the language committee members of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg Cultural Centre, who required that all three languages be represented to demonstrate the ways people relate to each other across national, linguistic, and ideological political boundaries, thereby strengthening community and sharing knowledge. Seventy-plus artists from diverse backgrounds were featured, including Joar Nango and his Sámi Architectural Library. Nango’s practice is based on Indigenuity, requiring the development of community at the site of and as the source of creation. The library was an intervention within the institutionalized settler-colonial gallery, achieved through the insertion of a different set of expectations regarding how the work would be produced, what characterizes an artist, and how knowledge is produced and transferred in galleries. Over the course of fifteen years, Nango accumulated a collection of books ranging in topics from traditional skin preparation in architecture to political texts about land rights, philosophy, and decolonial landscapes. He then decided to make his collection public and provide an architectural structure suitable to hold it. The curators acknowledge their responsibility as figures of authority to build a set of ethics based on values and qualities that work outside and within institutions to engage human rights issues such as poverty, race, sex, and gender discrimination, genocide and colonialism. In the exhibition catalogue, Rachelle Dickenson, Greg Hill and Christine Lalonde mention the process of straying away from the gallery’s “modernist impulse to be universal and encyclopedic” towards collaborative and generative practices, which begins with institutional self-reflection; whether requiring staff to spend time with objects, consulting with indigenous scholars and researchers, or developing programming outside the gallery into communities.  

The decolonization of the museum is not necessarily an impossible mission. However, it is certainly a difficult one. The colonial museum is not an isolated space, as seen throughout this paper; it is an accumulation, or, as Foucault calls it, a heterotopia, comprising centuries of collecting and perspectives shaped by a hierarchy of class and race. As an entity of authority, the apparatuses of the museum can assume realities purely based on the use of vitrines and wall labels. Additionally, its pronged role as both a colonial power and an educational institution for the public can conflate and continue harmful notions about indigenous peoples. As Leroy Little Bear wrote, “All colonial people, both the colonizer and the colonized, have shared or collective views of the world embedded in their languages, stories, or narratives… However, this shared worldview is always contested, and this paradox is part of what it means to be colonized.” The artists discussed —James Luna, Rebecca Belmore, Khalil Rabah, Maria Hupfield, Emily Jacir, and Joar Nango —take on the role of archivist by mobilizing art as a platform to reflect on and experiment with institutions after the failure of politics. By directly responding to national, historical, and contemporary states of emergency within the context of museological institutions, practices, and discourses, these artists bring forth the possibility of decolonization as an ongoing process. Colonial practices of collecting, displaying, and taxonomies are long outdated and have never served the needs of all citizens. Museums are beginning to revise their exhibition displays, restructure their governance framework for inclusivity, incorporate new forms of engagement through collaboration, and repatriate cultural belongings to their rightful communities. Museums are forever intertwined with their colonial legacy; however, we all must address and make amends in the territory of reparations and decolonization, for self-determination and healing for indigenous peoples across the world.

Sources:

“About - Woodland Cultural Centre - Brantford Museum.” Woodland Cultural Centre, January 20, 2023. 

https://woodlandculturalcentre.ca/about/. 

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso Publications, 2006.

Baldwin, James.“On Being White . . . and Other Lies” (typescript copy of article in Essence, April 1984), Anti-Racism Digital Library, 

https://sacred.omeka.net/items/show/238. 

Bear, Leroy Little. "Jagged Worldviews Colliding" In Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision edited by Marie Battiste, 77-85. 

University of British Columbia Press, 2000. https://doi.org/10.59962/9780774853170-009 

Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum : History, Theory, Politics. London: Routledge, 1995.

Bhabha, Homi K. “In a Spirit of Calm Violence.” In After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, edited by 

Gyan Prakash, 326–44. Princeton University Press, 1995. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt7t242.16. 

Danyluk, Stephanie, and Rebecca MacKenzie. Rep. Moved to Action: Activating UNDRIP in Canadian Museums. Ottawa, Ontario: 

Canadian Museum Association, 2022.

Dickenson, Rachelle, Greg Hill and Christine Lalonde. “Introduction” in Àbadakone. ed. National Gallery of Canada. Ottawa, Ontario: 

National Gallery of Canada, 2020.

Downey, Anthony. Khalil Rabah: Falling Forward ; Works (1995-2025). Sharjah (United Arab Emirates): Sharjah Art Foundation, 2023.

Fernandez-Sacco, Ellen, and Charlene Villaseñor Black. “Dying to Know You: Critical Insights from a Case Study of Indigenous 

Representations in Museums of the Early Republic.” In Visualizing Genocide: Indigenous Interventions in Art, Archives, and Museums, edited by Yve Chavez and Nancy Marie Mithlo, 212–36. University of Arizona Press, 2022. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv3006zsc.16. 

Fletcher, Kenneth R. “James Luna,” Smithsonian Magazine, April 2018. 

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/james-luna-30545878/

Fota, Ana. “What’s Wrong with This Diorama? You Can Read All about It.” The New York Times, March 20, 2019. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/20/arts/design/natural-history-museum-diorama.html. 

Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias.” Translated from Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité no. 5 (1984): 46-49.

Glanz, James, and Rami Nazzal. “Palestinian Museum Prepares to Open Minus Exhibitions.” The New York Times, May 16, 2016. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/17/world/middleeast/palestinian-museum-birzeit-west-bank.html. 

Gould, D. Rae. “NAGPRA, CUI, and Institutional Will,” in The Routledge Companion to Cultural Property, ed. Jane Anderson and 

Haidy Geismar (Abingdon, U.K., 2017), 134–51.

Hawley, Elizabeth S. “James Luna and the Paradoxically Present Vanishing Indian.” Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual 

Culture 5 (November 30, 2016): 5–26. https://doi.org/10.5195/contemp.2016.170. 

Hooper Greenhill, Eileen. Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge. London: Routledge, 1992.

“Israeli Art Wing - The Israel Museum.” Imj.org.il. https://www.imj.org.il/en/wings/arts/israeli-art. 

Jonaitis, Aldona and Elizabeth Kalbfleisch.“Native Performance Art: The Medium Is Wide Open,” in Native Art Now! : Developments in 

Contemporary Native American Art Since 1992. ed. Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, 318-335. Indianapolis: Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, 2017. 321.

Kasper, Kimberly and Russell G. Handsman, “Survivance Stories, Co-Creation, and a Participatory Model at the Mashantucket 

Pequot Museum and Research Center,” Advances in Archaeological Practice 3, no.3 (August 2015): 198–207.

Khalidi, Asem. “The Mamilla Cemetery; A Buried History.” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 37 (2009): 104–9.

Khaldi, Lara. “The Impossible Museum,” in Of(f) Our Times: Curatorial Anachronics edited by Rike Frank and Beatrice von Bismarck. 

London: Sternberg Press, 2019.

Khaldi, Lara. “The Phantom Archive: An Email Essay,” in Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine: A book on reading, writing, 

memory and forgetting in a library of Living Books edited by Mette ​​Edvardsen. Milan, Italy: Mousse Publishing, 2019. 

Lanteri, Michelle J., and Charlene Villaseñor Black. “Maria Hupfield’s Nine Years Towards the Sun: Reflections on Survival and Other 

Acts of Defiance in Performative Art Practice.” in Visualizing Genocide: Indigenous Interventions in Art, Archives, and Museums, edited by Yve Chavez and Nancy Marie Mithlo, 89–104. University of Arizona Press, 2022. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv3006zsc.10. 

Martine, David Bunn. “Pyramids, Art, Museum, and Bones: Some Brief Memories,” in Genocide of the Mind: New Native American 

Writing. ed. by MariJo Moore. 257-268. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2003

Morris, Kate. “Crash: Specters of Colonialism in Contemporary Indigenous Art.” Art Journal 76, no. 2 (2017): 70–80.

“Museum of Tolerance Jerusalem.” MOTJ, April 23, 2024. https://motj.org.il/.  

Nabi, Nabila Abdel. “Khalil Rabah: The Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind.” Vera List Center Forum 2023: 

Correction*, 2023, 11–14.

“NAGPRA at the Peabody: Past, Present, and Future.” Peabody Museum. https://peabody.harvard.edu/nagpra-peabody.

Nango, Joar. “Sharing Words, Hides, and Thoughts about an Archive,” in Àbadakone. ed. National Gallery of Canada. Ottawa, 

Ontario: National Gallery of Canada, 2020.

Nelson, Rachel. “On Perpetual Conflict,” in Under the Skin: Feminist Art and Art Histories from the Middle East and North Africa   Today ed. by Ceren Özpınar and Mary Kelly. Oxford: British Academy by Oxford University Press, 2020.

Nixon, Lindsay. “A Brief History of Indigenous Art and Resistance.” in A CULTURE OF  EXPLOITATION:“Reconciliation” and the 

   Institutions of Canadian Art. ed. by Hayden King. Yellowhead Institute, 2020.

Ollman, Leah. “Confronting All the Demons.” Los Angeles Times, June 16, 1996. 

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-16-ca-15485-story.html.  

Phillips, Ruth B. “Why Not Tourist Art?: Significant Silences in Native American Museum Representations.” In After Colonialism:     Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, edited by Gyan Prakash, 98–126. Princeton University Press, 1995.       https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt7t242.8. 

Vizenor, Gerald Robert. Manifest Manners : Postindian Warriors of Survivance. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1994.

WalkingStick, Kay. “Native American Art in the Postmodern Era.” Art Journal 51, no. 3 (1992): 15–17. 

   https://doi.org/10.2307/777343.