Contribution short abstract:

How can Indigenous collections in overseas cultural institutions be reimagined as a living archive? I reflect on this question by drawing on long-term collaborative research with the Indigenous custodians of a historical collection kept at Berlin’s Ethnological Museum.

Contribution long abstract:

How can Indigenous collections in overseas cultural institutions be reimagined as a living archive? What “decolonial affordances” (Basu & de Jong 2016) arise from such transformative work? What representational possibilities and relational obligations does it imply for the institutions that care for globally distributed Indigenous heritage?

Addressing these questions, my contribution draws on long-term collaborative research with the Indigenous custodians of a historical collection held by the Ethnological Museum Berlin. Bearing witness to extensive colonial entanglements between Germany and Australia, this assemblage has gained additional significance through the work of Indigenous artists and cultural activists who, over the past 15 years, have asserted a continued connection to these internationally displaced “Ancestral belongings” (Moulton 2018).

My project combines provenance research in German-language archival records and collaborative methodologies of working with Indigenous scholars, artists, and Elders in seeking to recover the collection’s interconnectedness with Indigenous histories, ontologies, and present-day cultural lives. “Activating” this relational potential (Gilchrist & Skerritt 2016) can support formations of Indigenous memory and cultural revitalization, reconstituting Berlin’s colonial archive as a record of Indigenous family history and “survivance” (Vizenor 1999). As such, this work offers a productive place from which to critically examine ongoing efforts to decolonize museums in Europe, including the epistemic, institutional, and administrative challenges that new, relational approaches to collections care must grapple with.