Decolonization & Indigenization Processes in Museum & Gallery Narratives and Spaces
- Rebecca Sykes
- Apr 26, 2017
- 5 min read
In my last blog post, I talked about the history of museum galleries as middle-class and disciplinary spaces designed to promote a certain cultured behaviour. I also considered the potentials of exhibition spaces, particularly alternative spaces outside the museum, to engage with the public in a site-specific way and encourage a different relationship of them to that space.
In this next blog, I want to revisit the concept of disciplinary order in museums and galleries, problematize it, and make suggestions as to how it might be overcome to allow for new possibilities of museum space, particularly for groups traditionally marginalize in or excluded from these institutions.
I want to refer to the National Gallery of Canada as my case study, with the Canadian Museum of History as a point of comparison. As an art history student who did her degree in the nation's capital, I've had to consider and re-consider the National Gallery on several occasions for my courses, particularly on the issue of including Indigenous art in the gallery. It's an institution that I have a lot of thoughts regarding, and one whose problems of inclusion, as I've come to see it, centre around the issue of space.
The National Gallery, like any national museum, has always had a problem being representative of the vast diversity of art works that form the national arts scene. In its orientation, the permanent galleries consist of two rings of gallery chambers, one large ring and one ring of smaller side chambers, built around an indoor courtyard in the centre. The larger galleries form a processional narrative of the chronological development of Canadian art. Meanwhile, the smaller side galleries offer an aside to the main narrative of progress, displaying smaller works such as portraiture and sketches, as well as regional schools such as the hyperrealism of the east coast.
Although the display of smaller works in the side galleries is, I feel, the most appropriate use of this space considering the proportions of the galleries, I find the relegation of regionalist schools and, quite often, Indigenous artists to be significantly more problematic.
In one tour of the Canadian galleries that my art history class was given, one curator explained that gallery staff had privately dubbed the final corner gallery, a smaller side chamber which contains works such as Michael Snow's Hawaii and Joyce Wieland's Young Couple, as the "sexy, sassy" room because these works had been placed there for their risqué content. However, this sobriquet refers only to those works in one part of the gallery chamber, while those around the corner yet still in the same room include works by Indigenous artists like Alex Janvier and Norval Morrisseau. If the gallery staff had set up the first half of this corner gallery as the "sexy, sassy" room, that would set up a third word following this alliteration to describe the Indigenous works around the corner, whether this word was ever said or not by the gallery staff.
It's likely the gallery staff never realized that they were setting up this extremely unfortunate alliteration for this corner gallery. They did, however, make curatorial decisions that have relegated Indigenous works to the side along with works they deliberately wanted further removed from the main galleries and their national narrative. This is despite the fact that these works as canvas paintings are more easily incorporated into the galleries, unlike the challenges the gallery has faced with the inclusion of historic Indigenous material culture.
In focusing on its chronological narrative and the strong collection of European art it already owns, the National Gallery of Canada chooses to relegate certain perspectives to the side.
Curator Gerald McMaster has proposed that museums and galleries consider an "inter-related history" of Canadian and Indigenous perspectives, rather than separating and privileging one over the other. He refers to the model of the Haudenosaunee two row wampum belt, which, in treaty-making, represents the parallel trajectory of Indigenous peoples and settlers, with the weft connecting the two in their shared histories.
McMaster sees focusing on the interrelatedness of Indigenous and settler histories as important based on his experiences with the Canadian Museum of History. He claims that while the museum presents two different perspectives, visitors of one perspective have a more difficult time relating to the other's perspective. He proposes a space of shared history to which more people could relate.
The artist Alan Michelson has taken such an approach in his work titled TwoRow II, which features panoramic video footage of the Grand River flowing on the banks of the Six Nations Reserve on one side and non-native Ontario on the other. The films are colourized and laid out to resemble a two-row wampum. Indigenous oral narratives and a captain's boat tour narrative overlap in an audio track.
TwoRow II and another work by Michelson titled Third Bank of the River symbolize settler and Indigenous shared histories, and when third space theory, or Homi Bhabha's theory of hybridity, is applied to these works, suggest a shared space can be found to tell our inter-related history. This space doesn't necessarily have to be found in a gallery and can instead be told in alternative exhibition spaces (see previous blog posting).
It should also be stated that national galleries, as third spaces for our inter-related history, are not going to replace Indigenous cultural centres and museums which are essential institutions dedicated to Indigenous sovereignty. As institutions representing Canada, McMaster has argued, they should represent this land as a whole more than any one historical narrative.
In order to present the National Gallery and other national museums as third spaces of our interrelatedness, museum staff need to draw on the separate but mutually-reinforcing processes of decolonization and Indigenization.
Amy Lonetree speaks about the importance of recognizing decolonization as a continuous process in that we must judge museums and other public institutions in their attempts to deal with the legacies of colonialism with today's standards and not those of ten years ago. She argues that curators should look to the Haudenosaunee practice of making decisions based on how they will affect at least the next seven generations.
Decolonization involves challenging and unlearning some of the things we have come to regard as truths. In order to do this with a public that is often unfamiliar with or even hostile towards Indigenous pedagogies, curators and museum professionals must be able to translate this knowledge so that the public can understand it. This is where Indigenization of the museum comes into play.
As Ruth Phillips explains it, Indigenization is the hybridization of mainstream museum practices and Indigenous concepts and practices. Phillips bases her understanding of Indigenization on the Canadian model of pluralist negotiation and dialogue, although some would reject pluralism in favour of Indigenous sovereignty.
Having both tribal museums or cultural centres belonging to Indigenous nations, and national museums and galleries focusing on telling inter-related historical narratives is essential for the processes of decolonization and Indigenization and for drastically re-imagining national narratives and spaces like the National Gallery of Canada.
Sources & Further Resources:
Amy Lonetree | Decolonizing Museums. Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums, 2012
Gerald McMaster | (Cultural) Objects of (Cultural) Value | In On Aboriginal Representation in the Gallery, edited by Lynda Jessup and Shannon Bagg, 2002
Ruth Phillips | Museum Pieces. Towards the Indigenization of Canadian Museums, 2012
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