ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the relationships between provenance narratives, ancient Mediterranean collections, and colonisation through the concept of density, as employed in Critical Indigenous Studies. In the context of this chapter, density represents an analytic that captures a depth to provenancing as a practice that is not defined by the traditional referent of property, but by a complex of relationships to various forms of colonisation. Therefore, this chapter explores the provenance of the Bay View Association's (BVA) Egyptian collection at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology in the context of its historical involvement in the colonisation efforts that took place in Egypt and North America near the end of the nineteenth century. The aim of this chapter is to expand the scope of provenance narrative writing by decentring the concept of “property.” I consider both how provenance is organised by the concept of property and the ways that the BVA collection is involved in different processes of colonisation. Through a methodology founded in postcolonial provenancing and critical indigenous theory, I expand the practices and discourses of provenancing by retelling the story of the mummified child from the Kelsey's Egyptian collection with a critical emphasis on the collection's colonial history in Egypt and Michigan, including dispossession policies and colonial schools. This shift sees provenance narratives as more than documentary research, but rather as explicitly political research. In this chapter, therefore, the provenance of cultural belongings and human remains is not only defined by legal ownership, but also by a collection's relationship to multiple apparatuses of colonialism.
