Indigenous Museums in the Northwest Coast of Canada and in the United States: collaboration, collecting and self-representation

Abstract

The revision of historical relationships of domination in ethnographic museums and the emergence and proliferation of indigenous museums are both part of the post-colonial turn of recent decades. While ethnographic museums have acknowledged their role as instruments of colonial expansion and started to consider the presence of the producers of the objects on display, indigenous museums initiated on-going claims of indigenous sovereignty over the definition and interpretation of their own histories. In this process of museological decolonization one of the crucial practices is the so called collaborative work between professionals that work in museums and indigenous populations. Departing from a series of cases from Canada and the United States that have collaboration as its corner-stones, this text intends to evaluate the scope, limits and contact points between collaborative work and indigenous self-representation, providing an analytic structure that goes beyond the borders of these two countries