ABSTRACT
The institutional recognition of existing peoples and communities who have an interest in these collections that exceed the traditional 'public' that such exhibitions have usually been constructed for is well overdue. Much recent work has been produced that focuses on the changes in museological practice that are a result of emerging new relationships with 'source communities' within what Ruth Phillips refers to as 'museums' second age'. Collaboration has become one of the major themes of critical museology and museum anthropology in the current moment. In a US context, abundant literature has been written about this subject since the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990 and the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC in 2004. Collaboration that is attentive to history, politics and power should actively work to integrate different systems of knowledge, avoiding the validation of one way of knowing over the other.
