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The limits of collections research and digital access flashed like a neon sign when we first partnered as graduate students for an undergraduate course on museum anthropology and community collaboration. “STOP,” the sign read as we instructed students to use an online portal displaying Karuk objects held in museum collections for their final project, a mock exhibit for the National Endowment for the Humanities. Incomplete, inaccurate object online data led to class confusion and frustration when Carolyn, an enrolled Karuk descendant and the class consultant, and Amanda, their graduate student instructor, said “no,” when students wished to include culturally inappropriate objects in the exhibit design. As we later observed, “In the information age in which access to data seems unlimited and can be taken for granted, they felt unprepared to do the tasks expected of them and were eager to be comprehensive.” Upholding the right of refusal, in the words of Audra Simpson, “articulates a mode of sovereign authority over the presentation of ethnographic data, and so does not present ‘everything’.”
As university professors, we return to questions of teaching care as we develop institutional spaces for object-based student learning. With Carolyn’s focus on the threatened environment from which Karuk basket materials are gathered, and Amanda’s reflection on narrating transnational objects united by histories of taking, we consider our responsibilities as architects of new spaces of object curation and interpretation.
In this article, we address multiple scales of care that comprise existing collections and knowledge production in the present and future. As Bill Brown states, “The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then is the story of changed relation to the human subject.” We see care for museums as an understanding of our role as stewards and as makers of physical and digital ecosystems. Evoking our role as educators, we reframe the rubric as a problematic to evaluate ourselves and how we care as museum anthropologists.
Rubrics are expressions of asymmetrical hierarchical relationships. One party outlines a set of expectations for another. Gamifying research, rubrics can uncritically promote meeting-ready targets over long-term engagements with the objects of anthropological learning and the communities in/beyond the university.
Considering our teaching practice through rubrics allows a space of reflection on how we were taught to care and what we were taught to care about. As Dan Hicks reminds us, it is standard in introductory material culture courses to describe human social relationships negotiated by objects through a foundational concept of gift-giving, a dynamic in which we have reciprocal obligations of debt to give and receive. And yet, as he critiques, anthropology’s historical refusal to develop a language for contexts of taking neutralizes difficult conversations, as harm is mistaken for naturally occurring “givens” that constitute a willful disciplinary debt.
Caring by Museums
Museum stewardship has established boundaries – care for collections. Building on practices of culturally appropriate care, Indigenous protocols offer a model of care for belongings beyond perfunctory physical upkeep. Inherent to the mediation of collections in exhibitions and public programming are networks of interactions between those who work internally within museum infrastructures, those who are the external audiences, and those who are stakeholders in museum work. The recognized financial precarity of the former group was underscored during the COVID-19 pandemic. Large-scale staff furloughs led to care materialized in campaigns like the Museum Workers Relief Fund. The degree of the museum’s responsibility to be “in the service of society” in the International Council of Museums’ definition remains contested.
Emerging frameworks, including the Guidelines for Collaboration between museums and Native American peoples, Standards for Museums with Native American Collections, and Indigenous Collections Care Guide, highlight culturally relevant and led stewardship. They establish that best practice is inclusive of meaningful collaboration. Of note, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act was recently revised to strengthen “the authority and role of Indigenous communities in the repatriation process.” In a transformation of museum authority with immediate implications, federally funded museums must “obtain free, prior and informed consent” from Tribes, lineal descendants, and Native Hawaiian Organizations to allow access to, exhibit, and research collections.
When we learned care in anthropological classrooms, we were trained in close looking, accessing archival records, and appreciating converging histories of disciplines and institutions. We came to recognize the utility of rubrics in terms of relational accountability or, as Shawn Wilson describes, “a process of systematically bringing relationships into consciousness and becoming accountable with, for, and to them.”
What follows is an assemblage of vignettes outlining how our research interests and personal commitments materialize in how we occupy physical and digital spaces and relationships. Following the framework of object lessons by Haidy Geismar, we trace “how knowledge is built up from objects, what interpretive frames we use, and the ways in which they bring particular views of the object into being.”
Caring as Weaving (Carolyn)
As a Karuk basketweaver and anthropologist, I have a complicated relationship with museums given their colonial origins. There is a heaviness that accompanies collections work. Interacting with baskets from my community in institutions that objectify them is difficult. Embodied within the basket are the memories, and connections that weavers have with the places that they visit, the plants that they gather, and relationships, both human and non-human, that they have nurtured.
Basket weaving requires an environmental attunement of when and what to gather. The interactive, embodied practice of weaving is a lifelong practice. When I spend time in collections, my personal practice of care honors the environment and the relationships from which the basket is woven.
Whenever I visit Karuk homelands, I see how they are stressed by climate change. Years of drought in California, a buildup of fuels in the forest from the lack of prescribed and cultural fires, and an aging power infrastructure created the conditions for the Slater Fire, which started on September 8, 2020, ultimately burning over 150,000 acres and destroying around 200 homes. The increased occurrence of megafires and infrequent use of low-temperature prescribed and cultural fires create a vulnerable landscape for basket weaving materials, even those materials that are fire-adapted, like hazel and beargrass.
Gathering Pearls and Returning a Lizard (Amanda)
Responses to environmental violence through reparative archive building calls for transnational ways of seeing or, as Deborah Thomas described, “an articulation of processes that both constrain and open up the range of futures that are possible”.
Walking through the University of St. Andrew’s Bell Pettigrew Museum of Natural History, I was confronted by animal bodies—from taxidermy figures to suspensions in formaldehyde and fossilized remains. Associated text labels emphasized specimen classification through scientific names as well as acquisition context with expedition descriptions.
I found myself staring at an unremarkable dish of pearls long past our tour group stop. A touchstone of a larger collections provenance project, part of a national movement around decolonizing traditional museum narratives, our guide, Conall Treen offered a disturbing account of the exploitation and forced labor of Indigenous communities in collecting expeditions throughout Australia and New Zealand. Pearl gathering was entangled in violent relationships grounded in dispossession and displacement. Beyond the economic value, collectors valued acquiring specimens for the advancement of scientific teaching collections and early public displays.
When community knowledge is disrupted, ties between museum collections and present-day landscapes require archival recovery. Not long after my museum visit, I came across the news of a repatriated lizard to the Natural History Museum of Jamaica from the University of Glasgow. Social media responses linked the return of the Jamaican Giant Galliwasp to the larger Caribbean reparatory justice movement’s call to redress the harmful legacies of the global slave trade on Indigenous and African descendant communities through a 10-point action plan. The lizard’s documented extinction in the 1800s due to loss of habitat—with the rise of a sugar plantation industry and the European introduction of predators—archives the impacts of empire on the environment. The lizard’s return indexed the possibility of a different material future, grounded in a Memorandum of Understanding and collaborative research.
Digital Care
Not unlike a plant, digital worlds require our tending. Ruha Benjamin considers how our popular discourse typically evokes visions of technology as our savior or our slayer, both eliminating the possibility of human intervention. To begin to define digital care, we must expand our field sites.
As material culture scholars who reconstruct acquisition histories, our digital work began as the practical needs of researchers who traveled across dispersed collections. Digitizing was our documentary response. Our intentional making of reference materials would form a larger assemblage of observations and field notes of our experiences in/with objects.
Our care of the digital transformed as a strategy of teaching practice. This is a shift from making as interpretation of existing collections to making as new paradigm building. The digital is an act of translation “because it suggests a recursivity that undermines distinctions and hierarchies around the original and the copy, that is, around the authentic object and a representation of it.” Similar to basket weaving, it entails material selection, processing, assembly and distribution. To ensure the knowledge preservation for future Karuk basket weavers, Carolyn and her teacher, Verna Reece, produced a series of books that translate hands-on, embodied learning. Like digitization, this analog work necessitates an intentional process.
Anthropologists warn against privileging digital spaces in favor of recognizing their analytical potential, which Daniel Miller and Heather A. Horst say “has often been to make these contradictions more explicit or to expose contextual issues of power.” As Hannah Turner explains, technology alone cannot escape colonial logics. Digital care is the recognition of inequitable access to digital power and a centering of ethics in the curation and maintenance of the materials that we create.
No Easy A
We have offered no rubric of idealized behaviors. Our provocation is not a rejection, as rubrics remain a useful construct predicated on the inescapable entanglement of relationality and accountability. Rejecting a hierarchical divide of care frameworks, we define Indigenous methodologies as best practice rather than alternative perspective. We center care through lessons of stewardship and collaboration bound up in our debt to belongings in archival repositories, communities, and ecosystems.
Central to caring for the “natural” is reconciling processes of museum accumulation and community loss. Our case studies demonstrate the value of decentering the ethnographic and reuniting assemblages across type categories. Within a relational accountability model, the acts of gathering and returning described are contrasting material modalities of taking, respectively inscribing relationships of extraction and repair in the past and present.
We have narrated an assemblage of experiences that underscore case studies of material fragility resulting from histories of disciplinary and colonial taking. Together, they call for individual commitments to acknowledge the ongoing relationality of our anthropological projects to pre-existing natural and emerging digital ecosystems, as well as an openness to understanding objects in ways that resist simple classifications of what it means to care.
Lilia McEnaney is the section contributing editor for the Council for Museum Anthropology.