ABSTRACT
The Monsopiad Cultural Village provides an example of a community-based cultural project that complicates the idealisation of Indigenous communities as unified and homogeneous wholes who have a clear direction on the management of their cultural heritage, and that Indigenous insiders will naturally act in the interests of one another against non-Indigenous outsiders. Here, the Indigenous elites who own the land and the collections on which the Monsopiad Cultural Village is based choose to rely on brokers for its management, and in so doing endorse a management structure that marginalises the Indigenous workers. By demonstrating how the categories of ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ within these community-based cultural projects are fluid and open to negotiation, I argue that such projects entrench a culture of dependency that leads to the marginalisation of some members of the Indigenous community in the hands of others.
