The Future Of Indigenous Museums

Indigenous museums and cultural centres have sprung up across the developing world, and particularly in the Southwest Pacific. This book looks to the future of museum practice through examining how these museums have evolved to incorporate the present and the future in the display of culture.

Museum exhibitions focusing on Native American history have long been curator controlled. However, a shift is occurring, giving Indigenous people a larger role in determining exhibition content. In Decolonizing Museums, Amy Lonetree examines the co

This book identifies a need to move beyond discussions of ownership, power and control in favour of exploring new kinds of partnerships between museums and the peoples or countries of origin, partnerships based on equitability and reconciliation.

Revision & Resistance reveals the story of Kent Monkman's monumental 2019 diptych commission mistik?siwak (Wooden Boat People) for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This book celebrates Monkman's historic achievement with essays and contributions by today's most prominent voices on Indigenous art and Canadian painting.

Museums and the Past explores the central role of museums as memory keepers and makers. Using case studies from a Canadian context, the contributors to this collection reflect on the challenges in maintaining and developing museums as meaningful places of memory and learning. Discussions of museum practice and historical consciousness – how our understanding of the past shapes our sense of the future – consider the modern museum’s narratives and pedagogical responsibilities and how museums continue to inform our sense of history.

Curating the Future: Museums, Communities and Climate Change explores the way museums tackle the broad global issue of climate change. It explores the power of real objects and collections to stir hearts and minds, to engage communities affected by change. Museums work through exhibitions, events, and specific collection projects to reach different communities in different ways. The book emphasises the moral responsibilities of museums to address climate change, not just by communicating science but also by enabling people already affected by changes to find their own ways of living with global warming. There are museums of natural history, of art and of social history. The focus of this book is the museum communities, like those in the Pacific, who have to find new ways to express their culture in a new place. The book considers how collections in museums might help future generations stay in touch with their culture, even where they have left their place. It asks what should the people of the present be collecting for museums in a climate-changed future? The book is rich with practical museum experience and detailed projects, as well as critical and philosophical analyses about where a museum can intervene to speak to this great conundrum of our times. Curating the Future is essential reading for all those working in museums and grappling with how to talk about climate change. It also has academic applications in courses of museology and museum studies, cultural studies, heritage studies, digital humanities, design, anthropology, and environmental humanities.

Becoming our Future: Global Indigenous curatorial practice is a co-publication based on the three-year Tri-Nations International Indigenous Curators' Exchange was a joint initiative between the Australia Council for the Arts, Canada Council for the Arts and Creative New Zealand. It features artists and the curatorial perspectives of Indigenous curators from Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Visualizing Genocide examines how creative arts and memory institutions selectively commemorate or often outright ignore stark histories of colonialism. The essays confront outdated narratives and institutional methods by investigating contemporary artistic and scholarly interventions documenting settler colonialisms including land theft, incarceration, intergenerational trauma, and genocide. Interdisciplinary approaches, including oral histories, exhibition practices, artistic critiques, archival investigations, and public arts, are among the many decolonizing methods incorporated in contemporary curatorial practices. Rather than dwelling simply in celebratory appraisals of Indigenous survival, this unprecedented volume tracks how massacres, disease, removals, abrogated treaties, religious intolerance, theft of land, and relocation are conceived by contemporary academics and artists. Contributors address indigeneity in the United States, Norway, Canada, Australia, and the Caribbean in scholarly essays, poems, and artist narratives. Missions, cemeteries, archives, exhibitions, photography, printmaking, painting, installations, performance, music, and museums are documented by fourteen authors from a variety of disciplines and illustrated with forty-three original artworks. The authors offer honest critique, but in so doing they give hopeful and concrete strategies for the future. This powerful collection of voices employs Indigenous epistemologies and decolonial strategies, providing essential perspectives on art and visual culture. Contributors T. Christopher Aplin Emily Arthur Marwin Begaye Charlene Villaseñor Black Yve Chavez Iris Colburn Ellen Fernandez-Sacco Stephen Gilchrist John Hitchcock Michelle J. Lanteri Jérémie McGowan Nancy Marie Mithlo Anne May Olli Emily Voelker Richard Ray Whitman