Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
3,128
result(s) for
"Museums and Indians"
Sort by:
This is our life : Haida material heritage and changing museum practice
\"In September 2009, twenty-one members of the Haida Nation came to Oxford and London to work with several hundred heritage treasures at the Pitt Rivers Museum and the British Museum. The encounter set a new course for the relationships between the custodians of these cultural artifacts and the indigenous people for whom the objects are a direct link to their past. Emotional and illuminating, tense and challenging, it was a transformative visit that none would soon forget. Featuring contributions from Haida people -- weavers, carvers, language speakers, youth, and Elders -- and museum staff -- curators, conservators, and collections management staff -- who participated in the project, and a rich selection of illustrations, This Is Our Life details the remarkable story of the Haida Project, from the planning to the visit itself and through the years that followed. A fascinating look at the meaning behind objects, the value of repatriation, and the impact of historical trajectories like colonialism, this is also a tender story of the understanding that grew between the Haida visitors and museum staff, as conflicting ideas about subjects as difficult as the repatriation of human remains and the white-gloved institutional approach to handling historical objects became a two-way dialogue.\" -- Publisher's website.
Book
Museum Pieces
Ruth Phillips argues that these practices are \"indigenous\" not only because they originate in Aboriginal activism but because they draw on a distinctively Canadian preference for compromise and tolerance for ambiguity. Phillips dissects seminal exhibitions of Indigenous art to show how changes in display, curatorial voice, and authority stem from broad social, economic, and political forces outside the museum and moves beyond Canadian institutions and practices to discuss historically interrelated developments and exhibitions in the United States, Britain, Australia, and elsewhere. Drawing on forty years of experience as an art historian, curator, exhibition critic, and museum director, she emphasizes the complex and situated nature of the problems that face museums, introducing new perspectives on controversial exhibitions and moments of contestation. A manifesto that calls on us to re-imagine the museum as a place to embrace global interconnectedness, Museum Pieces emphasizes the transformative power of museum controversy and analyses shifting ideas about art, authenticity, and power in the modern museum.
eBook
Visiting with the ancestors : blackfoot shirts in museum spaces
In 2010, five magnificent Blackfoot shirts, now owned by the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, were brought to Alberta to be exhibited at the Glenbow Museum, in Calgary, and the Galt Museum, in Lethbridge. The shirts had not returned to Blackfoot territory since 1841, when officers of the Hudson’s Bay Company acquired them. The shirts were later transported to England, where they had remained ever since. Exhibiting the shirts at the museums was, however, only one part of the project undertaken by Laura Peers and Alison Brown. Prior to the installation of the exhibits, groups of Blackfoot people—hundreds altogether—participated in special “handling sessions,” in which they were able to touch the shirts and examine them up close. The shirts, some painted with mineral pigments and adorned with porcupine quillwork, others decorated with locks of human and horse hair, took the breath away of those who saw, smelled, and touched them. Long-dormant memories were awakened, and many of the participants described a powerful sense of connection and familiarity with the shirts, which still house the spirit of the ancestors who wore them. In the pages of this beautifully illustrated volume is the story of an effort to build a bridge between museums and source communities, in hopes of establishing stronger, more sustaining relationships between the two and spurring change in prevailing museum policies. Negotiating the tension between a museum’s institutional protocol and Blackfoot cultural protocol was challenging, but the experience described both by the authors and by Blackfoot contributors to the volume was transformative. Museums seek to preserve objects for posterity. This volume demonstrates that the emotional and spiritual power of objects does not vanish with the death of those who created them. For Blackfoot people today, these shirts are a living presence, one that evokes a sense of continuity and inspires pride in Blackfoot cultural heritage.
eBook
Visualizing Genocide
Visualizing Genocide examines how creative arts and memory
institutions selectively commemorate or often outright ignore stark
histories of colonialism. The essays confront outdated narratives
and institutional methods by investigating contemporary artistic
and scholarly interventions documenting settler colonialisms
including land theft, incarceration, intergenerational trauma, and
genocide. Interdisciplinary approaches, including oral histories,
exhibition practices, artistic critiques, archival investigations,
and public arts, are among the many decolonizing methods
incorporated in contemporary curatorial practices. Rather than
dwelling simply in celebratory appraisals of Indigenous survival,
this unprecedented volume tracks how massacres, disease, removals,
abrogated treaties, religious intolerance, theft of land, and
relocation are conceived by contemporary academics and artists.
Contributors address indigeneity in the United States, Norway,
Canada, Australia, and the Caribbean in scholarly essays, poems,
and artist narratives. Missions, cemeteries, archives, exhibitions,
photography, printmaking, painting, installations, performance,
music, and museums are documented by fourteen authors from a
variety of disciplines and illustrated with forty-three original
artworks. The authors offer honest critique, but in so doing they
give hopeful and concrete strategies for the future. This powerful
collection of voices employs Indigenous epistemologies and
decolonial strategies, providing essential perspectives on art and
visual culture. Contributors T. Christopher Aplin Emily Arthur
Marwin Begaye Charlene Villaseñor Black Yve Chavez Iris Colburn
Ellen Fernandez-Sacco Stephen Gilchrist John Hitchcock Michelle J.
Lanteri Jérémie McGowan Nancy Marie Mithlo Anne May Olli Emily
Voelker Richard Ray Whitman
eBook
Plundered skulls and stolen spirits : inside the fight to reclaim native America's culture
A leading anthropologist \"explores the fraught project of repatriating Native American sacred objects in this moving and thoughtful work\" ( Publishers Weekly).
Who own the objects that connect us to history? And who has the right to decide, particularly when the objects are sacred or, in the case of skeletal remains, human? As senior curator of anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Chip Colwell has navigated questions like these firsthand. In Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits, he examines how to weigh the religious freedom of Native Americans against the academic freedom of scientists—and whether the emptying of museum shelves elevates human rights or destroys a common heritage.
Today, hundreds of tribes use the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to recover their looted heritage from museums across the country. Colwell shares a personal account of this process, following the trail of four objects as they were created, collected, and ultimately returned to their sources: a sculpture that is a living god, the scalp of a massacre victim, a ceremonial blanket, and a skeleton from a tribe considered by some to be extinct.
These stories reveal a dramatic process that involves not merely obeying the law, but negotiating the blurry lines between identity and morality, spirituality and politics. Repatriation, Colwell argues, is a difficult but vitally important way for museums and tribes to heal the wounds of the past while creating a respectful approach to caring for these rich artifacts of history.
eBook
The case of the portrait vandal
Somebody is vandalizing exhibits at the Capitol City Museum of American History, and it is up to twelve-year-old Raining Sam and his friends to find the culprit before irreparable damage is done.
Book
