Paper short abstract:

Attempts at decolonisation and reconciliation have radically altered the theory and practice of museum ethnography, making museums a new frontier in decolonized relationships. This paper looks at the impact of privileging a relational Anishinaabe centered approach to the person/objects in museums.

Paper long abstract:

This paper takes as its starting point a Canadian Anishinaabe perspective regarding the personhood of drums who are spoken of and treated as wiikanag, ritual brothers in their ceremonial context. In a museum context, these person/objects are also treated as animate; we would not have museums if we did not believe in the capacity of artefacts to educate. But what does this mean in a post-colonial museum? Can person/objects have transformative effects in contemporary museums? Can person/objects which have been alienated from family contexts reassert displaced memories and find unfettered contemporary aboriginal meaning? Do person/objects have dissonant voices sufficient to reset the history of their conscription to the project of enhancing the prestige of other nation's national institutions? Can the multisensory presence of drums who exist as sound in the consciousness of those who know them, counteract the colonial inertia of museums? Can objects participate in the border-crossing and contaminations which undermine colonial certainties and generate museums which are more fully 'heterotopic spaces.' This paper uses Alfred Gell, Marilyn Strathern and others to look at the nature of personhood in the museum, and at the apparent social agency of two Ojibwe drums both once owned by the same man, an Ojibwe medicine man named Naamiwan who lived in northern Manitoba from 1850 to 1943, and their role in changing two museums , one in Canada and the other in the US.