ABSTRACT
Indigenous peoples, globally, have a growing interest in cultural collections held in museums, archives, galleries, and libraries. Recognition of Indigenous people’s interests and rights to these materials has also led to increased efforts to ensure that source communities have better access to relevant collections and, in some cases, see objects repatriated. This chapter suggests another way of thinking about these moves as part of an expansive process of ‘return’ and argues for considered scholarship on the impacts of cultural collections being returned to Aboriginal communities in central Australia and beyond. Beginning with this chapter, this book interrogates the rhetoric of repatriation, proposes models, and methods for collaborative collections analysis and reveals the joys and insights, as well as the anxieties and complexities, which diverse experiences of cultural collections return can produce. The aim is to illustrate how collections circulate through social networks, inform relationships to place, and play a role in the constitution of cultural selves and collectivities. This is done by analysing the experience of return, tracking the circulation and movement of ethnographic collections and objects, and positing emerging methods of engagement with these materials.
