ABSTRACT
Decolonisation demands that scholars recognise Indigenous worlds’ parity with non-Indigenous ones, understanding that diverse ontologies (with their different cosmologies, material relations, concepts of society, spatiality, and temporality) not only demand different methods but also a re-evaluation of the core concepts of the discipline of theatre, such as the definition of acting. The chapter turns to Indigenous museology for a model of performance-centric and public historiographic practice that attends to ontological alterity, a historiography that is responsible, collaborative, processual, multi-modal, engaged, and responsive to the never-arrested becomings of its constituent communities and entities. It examines how the specific ontologies of Māori taonga have transformed museums in New Zealand, proposing new-old ways of imagining how historical understanding proceeds from interaction with matter. It concludes by offering a short case study of a recently mounted permanent exhibition at the National Library of New Zealand, He Tohu, that takes three documents — a declaration, a treaty, and a petition — each of which stands as a material remain of a past political performance, retains performative force as a legislative or demotic utterance, and performs anew by virtue of its activation within the dramaturgical frame of the exhibition.
