ABSTRACT
The museum, James Clifford reminds us, ‘is an inventive, globally and locally translated form, no longer anchored to its modern origins in Europe’. In exploring the local translations of the global museum of now, this chapter reaches beyond the Western heritage practices that still dominate the literature of museum studies, and explores the inventive adaptations of the museum form by those peoples colonised by Europe in the nineteenth century. But, though Native people are still commonly understood in the popular media today to be nostalgic for a romantic past (thanks to their historical representation in museums), in fact what they are concerned with is the past in the present. For them, heritage is about the future, not the past. Indigenous people, once denied a history and excluded from the present, view the global contemporary as a vital concern, as they do museums, despite the legacy of colonial museology, salvage anthropology and imperial rule. Indigenous cultures are not fixed in an ‘oppressive authenticity’ but are ‘transformed’ through their struggles to ‘resist and redirect projects of settler nationhood’. Indigenous art and material culture may have ancient precedents but its meanings are always ‘contemporary and changing’, and its creative and experimental variants cannot be dismissed as inauthentic. Indeed Indigenous heritage projects, whether in the visual arts and literature, public policy and environmental activism, or in museums and galleries, are usually directed towards the future, and have much to teach us about the world today, and how we think about it.
The title of this chapter offers a deliberate provocation. What is Indigenisation? Is there such a thing? How can museology be Indigenised? How is it different from conventional museology? How do the native and tribal approaches described in this chapter contribute to the aim of situating the museum in its global and contemporary contexts?
