Pacific curators restore Indigenous voices to colonial-era collections

(Press-News.org) Fault Lines: Imagining Indigenous futures for colonial collections, at the University of Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) from 6th December 2024 to 21st December 2025, examines interactions between Indigenous communities and colonial institutions in this vast and culturally diverse region. From the 18th century, Indigenous peoples across the Pacific have navigated a changing roster of imperial powers including Great Britain, France, Germany, the United States, Australia and New Zealand.

The exhibition combines historic artefacts with newly commissioned artistic responses to examine the enduring legacies of cultural extraction and destruction during the colonial era and the enduring power of Indigenous cultures.

MAA’s Director Professor Nicholas Thomas said: “For the first time, an international Indigenous curatorial collective has authored an exhibition at MAA. They have brought formidable knowledge and imagination to this powerful, question-raising show. The life of the Museum is in the new relationships that these projects bring. The exhibition invites visitors to reflect on their relationships to Indigenous artefacts but also to consider the future direction of the museums, like ours, which hold them.”

Fault Lines is curated by Noelle M. K. Y. Kahanu (Kanaka ‘Ōiwi/Native Hawaiian), Leah Lui-Chivizhe (Torres Strait Islander), Taloi Havini (Nakas Tribe, Hakö, born Arawa, Autonomous Region of Bougainville) and Jordan Wilson (Musqueam).

Exhibition highlights include two Hawaiian feather capes, ʻahu‘ula, intricately woven with red, yellow and black feathers from threatened and/or extinct birds, displayed following conservation treatment by leading Māori weaver and textile conservator Dr Rangituatahi Te Kanawa (Ngāti Maniapoto). Kanaka ʻŌiwi/Native Hawaiian artist Kapulani Landgraf responds to these historic capes (Pitt Rivers Museum and MAA) with a contemporary ʻahuʻula which asks of institutions – how are they caring for these ancestral treasures?’

A newly commissioned sculpture entitled ʻAuamo No Ka Ulu’ which loosly translates to ‘carrying pole for growth’ by Kunāne Wooton, a Kanaka ʻŌiwi/Native Hawaiian artist, provides an anchor object for the exhibition. Two wooden ki‘i (figures) carry the weight of a ko‘i (an adze) made from volcanic basalt, on their backs. Together, they keep the divide from getting bigger, holding together the fractured continuity of land, family and oneself brought about by colonisation. The work alludes to an ancient and endless volcanic ritual of birth, destruction and rebirth.

A rare example of a figure (bager) carved from coral is displayed alongside other fire charms from the Torres Strait collected by the Cambridge anthropologist and ethnologist Alfred Cort Haddon (1855–1940) in MAA’s collection. These charms were originally placed by fires to help keep them alight. Some, carved from lava, resemble the pregnant women who were often responsible for tending fires. Reunited for the first time, these objects offer a commentary on how British collectors historically neglected women’s roles in Torres Strait stories. Leah Lui-Chivizhe’s new research with communities in the Torres Strait seeks to recover this.

The exhibition will also premiere Taloi Havini’s documentary ‘Scratching the Surface’. The film sees the artist and co-curator retrace the steps of the celebrated British anthropologist Beatrice Blackwood (1889–1975). Featuring interviews with relatives of the people of Kurtachi village where the anthropologist was based in 1930, the film explores how they relate to Blackwood’s research. The film will play alongside a display of Blackwood’s diaries and drawings which she commissioned during her time on Buka Island, Bougainville. These archives, on loan from Pitt Rivers Museum, speak to the complexities of knowledge production with cultural knowledge holders in Bougainville and invites visitors to reflect on the role of museums and research today.

Works by Coast Salish contemporary artists Atheana Picha (Kwantlen First Nation) and Eliot White-Hill, Kwulasultun (Snuneymuxw First Nation) are brought together by Musqueam curator Jordan Wilson. Picha and White-Hill’s works offer responses to a selection of historic objects selected by Wilson that foreground the resurgence of ancestral craft, community presence and responsibilities of return. Picha’s work unites handmade blankets, carved pins and painted drums with photographic portraits of Elders from her community wearing these works.

White-Hill’s ‘A Case for Reconciliation’ diptych offers a provocative commentary on how colonial-era collections maintain a distance between Indigenous cultures and communities that requires institutions to actively initiate redress. The artist presents two museum items, a spindle whorl and a hand maul, alongside contemporary handpainted boxes holding their negative space.

Noelle Kahanu, lead curator of Fault Lines said: “Each of us live far away from these European colonial repositories, but this exhibition has given us the opportunity for our communities to reconnect with these ancestral works. Each of our stories and interventions are distinct but related. How might we consider museums as sites of both fracture and potentiality? And how might  Indigenous notions of care might be utilised to reframe the way colonial institutions consider their custodial responsibilities.”

Featuring over sixty historic objects, including loans from both the British Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum, Fault Lines highlights how collecting networks have cemented relationships between Britain and each of the curators’ Pacific homelands.

‘Fault Lines: Imagining Indigenous Futures for Colonial Collections’ runs at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge from 6th Dec 2024 – 21st Dec 2025 and is Free Admission.

The exhibition is a research output of the European Research Council Grant no. 803302 ‘Indigeneities in the 21st Century’ project.

Media contacts

Tom Almeroth-Williams, Communications Manager (Research), University of Cambridge: researchcommunications@admin.cam.ac.uk  / tel: +44 (0) 7540 139 444

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