Racing Turtles

from The Rings of Saturn, WG Sebald

Happy International Museums Day to the following people:

We have officially reached a viewership level that has never been obtained by another museum before! All of us at the Sacramento History Museum are in disbelief.

We would have never thought that our institution, a small nonprofit museum in Sacramento, California, could reach this many views, but we are incredibly thankful for all of those who take the time to watch our videos and for your support.

In this video, Howard letterpress printed a headline announcing “Sacramento History Museum Reaches One Billion Video Views On YouTube” while using our Washington hand press, which was manufactured in 1852!

a lot of ppl in the notes of the previous post are mentioning museums hoarding stolen cultural objects which is important beyond measure but museums shutting down due to lack of funding will not result in repatriation of cultural materials, they would most likely be auctioned off to private ultra-wealthy collectors to recoup some of their debt and we’d never find these objects again let alone be able to repatriate them. i understand the desire to say ‘fuck museums let them die’ for this reason but it won’t have the result you think it will, and it will also mean that all of their ethically sourced and donated materials (which for most museums are the vast majority of their collections) will no longer be cared for by experts but again, sold off to private collectors who can do whatever they want with them or deteriorate in storehouses indefinitely. this would be catastrophic for public history and collective knowledge-sharing across the globe across cultures, and museums in post-colonial and run by/for racialized or otherwise oppressed ethnic groups will fall first because they receive FAR less funding than the large western institutions. just repeating phrases and sentiments you’ve seen online as a form of performative activism without knowing anything about what you’re talking about does more harm than good and doesn’t make you look smart or clever just foolish it’s so deeply annoying and frustrating

i don’t know why all of you seem to think the only museums that exist are the massive western imperial institutions that have historically dealt with stolen artefacts, the majority of museums are Not these large institutions and there are museums across the globe in every country that require funding to preserve That Country’s Own Material History. stop acting like you know everything because you read a twitter thread about it oh my fucking god

Another aspect for people to be aware of is that there are regulations and laws that museums must adhere to concerning cultural property. If you want to ensure that museum collections are being looked over and objects being returned, advocate for more funding and job positions. I work for a pretty large museum, but we struggle to keep up with NAGPRA and Provenance research because we need money. Museums (even places like Met and Getty who are very problematic) have employees with good intentions and WANT to follow regulations. Protests in the halls of Museums won’t do much except annoy and harrass low wage part timers. Join Advocacy Days, volunteer, contact politicians if you really want to make a change.

There is so much amazing about this. It's an archeological museum in 530 BCE or so. Also, the exhibits are labeled in three languages. Also they apparently had replicas on display for some things, much like modern museums do.

Humanity has not really changed that much, and some of the ways in which we haven't changed are really good.

art museum

My fellow museum pros: we should be looking at the current strikes happening and be taking notes

Some museums that are striking;

COLLEEN DORAN ILLUSTRATES NEIL GAIMAN now on display at the Society of Illustrators until late July. https://societyillustrators.org/event/colleen-doran/

Shoutout to the time my partner and I got so excited to see Ea-Nasir's hate mail in person that we failed to notice the Code of Hammurabi next to it

Me entering any museum: man I’m so excited to learn all the things

Also me: GIFT SHOP GIFT SHOP GIFT SHOP

There are two dragons inside of you. One hoards knowledge and the other hoards trinkets. They’re both very excited when you bring them to a museum

https://survey.alchemer.com/s3/7118149/mutter

I don’t usually make posts like this one. I don’t really have many causes I feel that I can personally speak out about in a truly informed fashion. However. The Mütter museum? That I can tell you all about.

The Mütter collection was originally formed from the private anatomical collection of Dr. Thomas Dent Mütter. He was not a really remarkable guy, honestly. Pretty average at surgery, and according to the former curator Ella Wade, his students found him to be a boring speaker. He also grew up on a plantation as a white man. Not a great look.

But here’s the thing: he had this anatomical collection, and it was really well prepared and curated, and he was sick. He needed to get his affairs in order. He bequeathed it to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia in the 1860s with the stipulation that they build a fireproof building to hold it, and that nothing from his collection ever be removed.

That core collection became multiple collections. The people who are permanent residents are some of my dearest loves. They are icons representing so many social, political, and physical struggles.

There are he Hyrtl skulls, who represent one man’s struggle to take down racial pseudoscience- they’re all white Europeans of “poor moral character” according to phrenology. The point was to show that EVERY SINGLE ONE LOOKS COMPLETELY DIFFERENT and that cranial shape had no bearing on moral capacity, nor brain size.

There’s Mary Ashberry, who has achondroplasia. She died three days after an emergency c-section in 1837, because doctors didn’t do their job right. Her pelvic outlet was too narrow to let her baby pass through (a common problem people with achondroplasia deal with). Doctors did not remove her baby properly (I’m flossing over gruesome medical history stuff here). She was forced to have a c-section BEFORE GERM THEORY. She lives for three days after. She is every person forced to give birth.

There’s Carole Orzel, who died from fibrodysplasia osificans progressiva- FOP for short. Her soft tissue slowly turned to bone. She DONATED HERSELF to the Mütter because she was so inspired as a young woman meeting their skeleton with FOP that she wanted to teach others.

There are babies whose bodies were incompatible with life, who a hundred and fifty years later are still teaching people, still inspiring people, and still being loved. And honestly? I think that’s the most beautiful thing.

The new director of the museum and the new ceo of the college want to stop all that. They genuinely want to remove any reference to human remains being in the museum at all from everywhere they can. If you search for the Mütter on YouTube now, you won’t find any educational videos about the medical collections. No. You’ll find clickbait about the creepy museum with dead babies in jars. The ceo and director had all of the videos with human remains in them removed. INCLUDING THE ONE BY THE MAN WHO DONATED HIS OWN DANG HEART.

This is a museum that actively works to confront the issues in the past. This is a museum that wants to SHOW YOU THEM in a sensitive and informative way. There are no photos allowed within the museum, because the dead cannot consent to them. But they can teach us. And speak to us, and welcome us into their residence.

If you have a minute, would you be willing to fill out this survey, and tell the museum how important these collections are to you? Because honestly? They should be. We cannot erase history. We cannot declare ourselves the arbiters of ethics. We are not judge, jury, and executioner for these collections.

People are squeamish about human remains in museums. And that leads to people trying to sweep them under the rug and neglect their duty of care to those under their stewardship. It is the utmost disrespect to forget the dead, to forget these people. And they ARE people.

I say that as a Jewish woman. We say “may their memory be a blessing” when someone dies. Please help me stop the museum from forcing us to forget these people, these stories, these friends of mine. Help make their memories continue to be a blessing.

I love you natural history museum I love you "a walk through time in this region" I love you Dunkleosteus head I love you giant dinosaur diorama I love you guy cleaning fossils behind the pane of glass I love you bird skeletons next to dinosaur skeletons I love you geologic time mural I love you dinosaur-themed gift shop

A serie in progress around museum things and my own world!

This display in Ashmolean Museum shows how touching artwork affects material.

This is why museum staff get really upset when visitors touch stuff Please don’t touch the collection objects!

This is such a great way to do it, though! Don’t just tell people not to touch, show them exactly why they can’t.

The local museum is run by an eccentric old man who knows the opening pieces like he was there for their whole history. His secret? He’s a secret dragon who figured out if you display your hoard, people will give you new things to display.

#Unfortunately you find out while trying to rob the place. He does still sleep on his hoard. Typical. (from obesecamels)

Chattin’ about my job.

I have several questions and they all have to do with how you are sitting

Look, I’m queer, and that means all my limbs must be splayed at all times.

So Sue on display is a replica and the real Sue is behind the scenes being kept safe and studied? Cool.

This is fantastic and begs the question: So why the hell are we not just making replicas of everything then and returning the artifacts to their original creators/owners?

I love seeing dinosaur fossils in the museum. Knowing they’re replicas does not detract from how amazing they are.

And since most people do not know they’re replicas, I feel like we could just replace all the things (totem poles, masks, etc) with replicas and no one would notice or bat an eye.

I ask myself this aaaaaaaaaaaaaaallllll the time. There are some replicas used, of course, but not as many as there probably should be. Using more replicas just has so many advantages. The originals go back to the people they belong to, artisans and crafters (hopefully of the same group that made the originals) get employment creating the replicas, we get to learn more about how these things were made in the process of remaking them, guests could actually handle and interact with things, etc.

Ok so fun fact but in the US we actually are! @kaijutegu can tell you a lot more than I can, but replicas are one of the ways the museums in the US maintain informational displays while still complying with the repatriation part of NAGPRA. :)

1. SUE isn’t a replica. The head is because the actual cranium was crushed and would be too heavy to mount safely even if it wasn’t, but the entire cranium is on display in a separate case. Everything else (minus a few bones that are missing) is absolutely real. At least the one at the Field Museum is. There’s a couple of casts, many of which travel (and one of which lives full-time at Disney World), but the one at FMNH is virtually completely real. Just wanted to point that out because that fossil is actively studied while being on full-time display. There’s ways to do that, and frankly having SUE articulated is actually a lot more useful to scientists than having the specimen in storage.

2. SO THIS IS COMPLICATED OK BUT:

tl;dr: museum guests need to be able to walk away from Native American exhibits knowing a.) that these people and cultures are still alive and b.) a story that encompasses historical truth, spiritual and cultural truth, and scientific truth. These needs are best met by displays blending modern pieces with historical pieces and exhibits co-curated with representatives of actual Native American groups.

As always, this is North American focused, using the US legal framework behind repatriation. Also this is SUPER long but I swear I will get to a point about recreations and why they work better than replicas. Eventually. Please don’t feel the need to leave comments like “you expected me to read an essay?” because this response is not for you. I care. A lot. About this stuff. I care about museums. I care about them moving forward. I care about Native American narratives and letting marginalized people tell their stories in the way they want, and I care a lot about thinking about how to make majority culture sit up and pay attention to what people have to say about themselves.

Let us start by saying that: The communication around repatriation is a two-way street. A lot of people on tumblr got really fucking mad at me the last time I tried to talk about nuance when it comes to repatriation, but I have worked repatriation cases and not all Native American groups want all of their stuff back. (Like the nearly 1,000 Athabaskan baskets in the Field’s basement. We’ve asked. They don’t want those back. Or the thousands of Ancestral Puebloan black-on-white pots and potsherds. The modern Pueblo are a-ok with those being somewhere else. I’m not saying that all groups are like this, those are just two of the cases I personally worked where the people I spoke to really didn’t want their stuff back.) Sometimes a basket is just a basket. Sometimes a dress is just a dress. Sometimes these things being on display are more important to the native groups, because they help tell their story and are a shareable piece of one group’s cultural heritage. Native Americans are not a monolithic culture with a monolithic spiritual system and a monolithic understanding of the past. What one group might want might be completely anathema to another. Even groups that DO want things returned typically don’t want everything. It’s not just about things. It’s not just about tangible material. It’s... almost like the material itself is sometimes immaterial because the importance generally isn’t in the physical value of the material. A group might not really care about the jewelry we have on display but they might REALLY WANT their ritual effigies back, even though the jewelry is much more financially valuable. A lot of people think that repatriation is about greed on the part of the Native American groups, about wealth, but... it’s not. It’s really, really not. It’s about preserving elements of a culture that can’t be preserved in a museum. It’s about freely practicing your culture’s spiritual beliefs, about being reunited with family. Repatriation, when done correctly, is a homecoming. It is the acknowledgment of sovereignty and of a living culture.

So what’s the next step, after giving these important objects back? How does the museum maintain their educational mission when the original object needs to go home? You can tell people the story without the object... but you still have to be effective as an educational display! There’s a lot of things to consider, especially if the was object on display. What story was it telling? How did the museum get the object? If it was bought or given, who sold/gave it, and what was their authority to do so? All of these considerations boil down to one of three-ish options:

1. Take it off display and do nothing. 1a. Take it off display and use the space to explain why it was returned, but put no new object in the space. The hole in the collection is now an educational opportunity to talk about NAGPRA.

2. Replace with a replica.

3. Replace with a recreation.

There’s a few schools of thought on this. I’ve worked in museums in various capacities since 2011, and have a pretty good idea of the future of how Native American artifacts are going to be effective in museums. It’s a conversation that is happening and needs to continue to happen, and the most dominant voices should be the cultures that created those objects. Who can tell their stories better than them? Frankly, we owe it to them to lead the way in this conversation on what should be displayed. We owe them the platform and the financial support and the audience that big natural history museums have to talk about their history in the way they want- and we owe it to ourselves. Permanent anthropology exhibits in natural history museums are due for a reckoning. They are often extremely othering and, (to some extent, paleoanthropology aside), are often caught up in outdated narratives pushing an outdated agenda. It’s impossible to have a morally neutral anthropology exhibit- there’s always going to be an agenda because humans are complicated. With the taxidermied animals, you can say things like “This is an antelope. Here’s what antelopes do.” An antelope on its own has no moral value, no history of cultural oppression. It’s just an antelope. You can’t say that about a cultural group - our perceptions of how people act are always going to be biased. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, mind you- all humans have a bias. It’s inescapable. All cultures perceive other cultures in certain ways, and what’s important is that we recognize how that perception changes over time. We look at the racism of the past, we acknowledge it, but we also provide a space for the future. We don’t say “it’s over and done, let’s forget it,” but we do have to move on and improve ourselves. The only way that’s getting done is if the institution changes how it represents itself and the people it’s talking about. (If you want to see an example of this, check out how the Field recontextualized its old “Races of Mankind” sculptures. The exhibit is now called Looking at Ourselves and it really gets into the history of scientific racism, and how old ideas of how Americans thought about race and racial differences were spread and changed over time. Google Arts and Culture has some of the images here: https://artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/rethinking-the-sculptures-of-malvina-hoffman-the-field-museum/bQIy0COTLheZKA?hl=en

And the Field’s page on it is here: https://www.fieldmuseum.org/exhibitions/looking-ourselves-rethinking-sculptures-malvina-hoffman)

They also... god, I’m really telling on myself here, but they’re also boring. Guests don’t like them! Walking through a hall of display cases with limited information, faded colors, and dim lights sucks. NOBODY enjoys this. It’s not 1930 anymore. If I want to know what a jingle dress looks like, I can google it. Museums need to offer a hell of a lot more than just imagery. They need context. They need to provide information that wikipedia cannot. They need to provide a tangible experience, and you can’t get that from just looking at display cases of clothes and tools. Guests want a narrative. These old halls simply don’t provide that. If museums want to maintain their educational value, they need to create a space for storytelling, for engagement. People want authenticity, let’s give that to them.

Anyways, I’m rambling. Back to the importance of recreations, rather than replicas, in museum anthropology.

So. Recreations, not replicas, are becoming more and more important to the process of repatriation and decolonizing museums. I’ve talked about this before, but if you actually talk to Native American groups, generally speaking they want people to know about their culture- both their history and their present. One of the most frustrating things about my research assistantship at the Field, when I did a bunch of visitor exit surveys, was realizing that despite seeing modern objects and despite walking through a gallery of Native American art commissioned by the museum from and curated by a modern Pawnee artist (Bunky Echo-Hawk) and seeing videos of interviews with this guy, seeing a picture of him, given plenty of evidence that he is very much alive, active, and Native American... given all that evidence, some visitors came away thinking that Native Americans were extinct. “I didn’t know there were any left,” “I’m surprised that there are Native Americans in Chicago,” it was... bad.

And it wasn’t just white people, either! All kinds of people genuinely thought that despite seeing a painting of Yoda wearing a war bonnet (probs Echo-Hawk’s most famous painting, he does a lot of pop culture combined with Native American iconography), that Native Americans were a thing of the past. This is a HUGE PROBLEM, because when we treat a whole bunch of living people like they’re actually dead, it pushes them into this realm of... disbelief, I think is the word? Fictive thinking? Majority culture doesn’t feel a need to care about what is happening to Native Americans because our dominant educational and entertainment platforms talk about them as a thing of the past. But it was a step, bringing in modern Native American art. Baby step. But a step.

So a couple years later, they tried again. This time they worked with Rhonda Holy Bear. I wasn’t around for the exit surveys, but they tried emphasizing her presence more (with pictures of her standing with the stuff she made and the stuff she pulled from museum collections to put on display), and it was really well-received. Then, while that was going on, the museum invited Chris Pappan to hang up ledger art all around the old Native American hall, and the response to that was incredible. Basically, he recontextualized these old displays that create a distorted image of Native cultures and it was fantastic and it actually made people go “wait a minute... this stuff is NEW.” It made people sit up and pay attention, and it was finally tangible evidence for our collections team that there was a way to make museum guests engage with contemporary Native issues.

So that leads us to the past couple of years, and even the best, most ethical museums are facing a problem and grappling with it in different ways. How the hell do we get people to understand that Native American cultures are real, vibrant, vivid, and most importantly living? Yes, the US government committed genocide against them... but they aren’t all dead! Native Americans are still here. What’s the point of painting a picture of the past when that picture obscures the present? This puts a lot of us in a really tenuous position because museum displays are traditionally pretty static.

So we could do the replica route, but... that kinda keeps us rooted in the past. FURTHERMORE, not all replicas are ethical! There are some groups who consider casts of their ancestors offensive, because of what the casting process represents to them- the desecration of their ancestors’ bodies in the name of science. This is not true of all Native American cultures- there’s many, many different beliefs about what is acceptable to do with a body. The same is true of sacred objects. If you make a replica, an exact replica of the thing you don’t want on display... does it still hold the power? Is it still important that some people be disallowed to see it? Is it still exposing the sacred ritual to people who have no business being involved with it? Again: not all groups will answer the same way. Additionally, replicas don’t always play well with visitors. At least when they bother to read the signs. They want authenticity, or some version of it. Even if the replicas are made by the originating culture, “replica” plays poorly with guests in the anthropology halls. You have to strike a balance between what guests will actually look at and learn from and what’s the best thing to display. Recreations, however, are different. A recreation is the object reinterpreted. Given a spin, whether it’s just personal or a whole modern twist. Guests respond super well to recreations because when they see history+artistry, it gives them a better understanding of the culture. When you see a modern artist making something, it cements that connection in your mind. 

So, from the three Native American designed and curated exhibits, here’s what we learned between 2013 and 2016:

-Guests are able to perceive cultural continuity between past Native Americans and modern Native Americans if the modern pieces are contextualized with historical pieces.

-Native American exhibits curated by Native Americans are really, really well-received by museum guests when compared to a traditional exhibit originally mounted in the 1930s and then updated slightly in the 1950s, a slightly more focused one from the 1980s that was updated in the mid 1990s and then again in the early 2000s for NAGPRA stuff, and an arguably pretty good one from the mid 2000s. The update to the OG exhibit, where Chris Pappan put ledger art up on the old display cases, was particularly popular. (So much so that it finally got enough public interest for the corporate wing to say “ok you can finally have the money and staff to redo this hall,” which is currently a process being undertaken with significant direction from Native Americans from various nations and organizations.)

So there’s... kind of an obvious solution to that problem of “how do we get people to understand and care.” We have to juxtapose the modern with the historical, and it has to be led by the descent community of the people who made the historical. It’s not that hard, as it turns out, to do this. All you need is money from the endowment (tbh this is the hardest thing to get, if you can get a white/rich/male board of directors to care about this kind of thing, the rest follows pretty easily in comparison), a willingness to open up the collections and space, and the pursuit of active partnerships with Native Americans. The Field was able to put on three exhibits in the span of three years, and in 2019 they launched a fourth. Apsáalooke Women and Warriors, it’s called, and it’s phenomenal.

"Instead of presenting objects chronologically or rigidly divided by materials or technique, the exhibition counterposes and blends contemporary and antique pieces, showing images of creative women past and present together with objects and representations of the Apsáalooke warrior past. The result is to show the museum visitor the Apsáalooke as people not locked into the past, but continually inspired by and growing from it. Nina Sanders writes: “Our ultimate goal is to deliver our own narratives, write our own scholarship, and educate the world about our cultures, worldviews, and experiences.”“

https://culturalpropertynews.org/apsaalooke-women-and-warriors-in-chicago/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=apsaalooke-women-and-warriors-in-chicago

This exhibit’s powerful message comes from the modern and old existing in harmony, side-by-side. With the backing of a big cultural institution like the Field, the Apsáalooke artists and scientists involved in creating this exhibit are able to share their story with the world in a way that wouldn’t be possible without both of those components.

Going forward, having contemporary Native creators and scholars involved in the curation process is going to be vital to how museums talk about Native Americans. The only way forward is actually letting Native Americans tell their modern story alongside the story of the past. It’s a way for these big institutions to give a platform and voice to people that have historically been exploited by these institutions. Recreations are going to be absolutely vital to this going forward. Replicas too, though I think not as much, because the stories of Native Americans aren’t finished.

I had a real brain blast moment and decided the best possible birthday gift I could give myself would be to run absolutely hog wild through the American Museum of Natural History's online gift shop for 20 minutes and fulfill all those childhood museum gift shop promises I made to myself way back when, so I did that!

also in all seriousness, museums, zoos and aquariums are in dire straits from the pandemic so if you're looking for some scientific plushies or toys, please consider checking to see if your local institutions have an online store you can use!