“The scene takes no more than five minutes of the movie, and the tension between colonial history and race only escalates from that point on. However, we as museum professionals need to talk about the inclusion of this scene, especially regarding its function in a film that was cut from nearly four hours long in its first iteration to a solid two, a film that so many young people will see and one that is poised to become a cultural touchstone. The museum is presented as an illegal mechanism of colonialism, and along with that, a space which does not even welcome those whose culture it displays.
And is there anything incorrect about that?
It is worth considering the aspects of the scene that are realities in the modern museum. African artifacts such as those shown in the film’s museum are likely taken from a home country under suspicious circumstances, such as notable artifacts in real-life Britain like the Benin bronzes which now reside at the British Museum. It is often the case that individuals will know their own culture as well as or better than a curator, but are not considered valuable contributors because they lack a degree. People of color are less represented in museum spaces, and often experience undue discrimination while entering gallery spaces. Finally, museums are experiencing an influx of white women filling staff roles, leading to homogenized viewpoints, and lack senior staff with diverse backgrounds. With these truths represented in such a short but poignant scene, the tension between audiences and institutions is played out to the extreme.”
About a year ago, I learned something sinister about museums that really fucked me up.
If you’ve ever spent time in a history/culture museum, you may have noticed that the rooms with Native or African artifacts tend to be very dimly lit compared to other parts of the museum. You probably thought (as I did) that it’s because the artifacts are old and light sensitive. Sometimes that’s the case. Lots of times, though, it’s not.
Museums often display *contemporary* African and Native artifacts in rooms with dim lighting because they’re trying to construct a mythology around these artifacts. The lighting subconciously suggests to us these are relics from the past, from “dead” cultures, even when they’re not.
Furniture and silverware from 1750s Europe? Bright lighting, placed on a lower museum floor that gets lots of foot traffic. Shields made by members of an African tribe in the *1930s*? Dim lighting, placed on a quiet upper level of the museum that feels like a mausoleum.
This is completely intentional. Museums play into our Western notions of whose culture is “alive” and whose is “dead.” They give us what they think we want to see. They’re also doing real political harm, because if they can convince us that African and Native cultures are relics of the past, that means we don’t have to think about what we’re doing to the (very much still alive) peoples that they represent.
I love museums, but shit like that’s gotta stop.
I’ve had two pretty eye-opening experiences in regard to museums: I read Chasing Aphrodite, which revealed the appalling amount of antiquities theft that’s still taking place, and I visited the National Museum of the American Indian, which provided the contrast that made me realize how I’d been trained to think of Native American cultures as dead.
I learned about Native cultures in school. I was fascinated and admiring, I read all kinds of books and went to museums; if you’d asked I’d say I loved and respected these beautiful people and their varied beliefs. But the way I was taught about Native Americans wasn’t the way I was taught about US history, or about Europeans. The curricula taught about Native cultures and beliefs the same way they taught about Sumerians and ancient Egyptians, and so I learned the implied lesson: Native cultures were past, they were gone, they were dead. None of the museums I went to challenged that, just as the writer above explains. (Moreover, nobody taught us kids about modern Native people, their sociopolitical issues, or their cultures- as far as we knew, Native people were quaint historical footnotes, and any of their descendants still alive had the same lives and concerns as us white suburbanites.)
When I first went to NMAI I was confused, because it felt different than I expected and I couldn’t figure out why. Eventually I realized it was because I went expecting a temple to sadly dead mythologies and ways of life, and what I saw instead was a cultural history lovingly curated and cared for by its inheritors, just as any other modern ethnicity or nationality remembers and teaches its history. I recognize it’s not exactly the same as say, remembering Italian-American history, because of the weight of the genocide committed against Native people, and the sometimes all-too-successful attempts to wipe out their cultures. But my point is that in NMAI, I learned that Native cultures are alive, and it made me realize just how badly wrong my thought process had been to that point.
I am certainly not an expert in museums or in anything related to NMAI, but I can’t help thinking that the difference is in large part because Native people are so deeply involved in creating the exhibits and maintaining the collections. The exhibits feature Native voices and commentary, and they talk about Native life and culture today, making it clear that these communities haven’t simply vanished into the past. Just another example of how critically important representation is- it may be that ALL museums that handle Native or African objects/art need to have staff of African or Native descent, or it may be that they simply need to consult and take advice from modern representatives of the culture in question. I’m sure this would lead to the usual cries of “political correctness run amok” that always arise from certain quarters; but really, it’s the idea that white people alone get to decide how best to select and display artifacts from other culture (cultures which still exist, and have plenty of living representatives) that’s exceptionally weird.
Anyway, if you’re within range of DC I’d suggest you check out NMAI to see what I mean, it’s a cool place. (Also their restaurant is completely rad, so there’s that.) (And if anyone else knows museums that provide good examples of curatorship of living cultures, I’d be interested to know about them.)
Video based on quantum physics. The colored balls are placed together alone by the resonance of the quartz crystals. Each color has a different resonance. In the same way we group the people that vibrate in the same frequency. This is how the universe works.
