Decolonising the Pitt Rivers Museums

The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford has an externally funded full-time researcher, Marenka Thompson-Odlum, for a project titled Labelling Matters.

She has several strands of research. One involves the labelling of permanent displays as well as individual objects. She deconstructs, among other things, the language used; who is providing the voice; and how that language depicts the creators of the objects and the cultures from which the object originates.

There will be new texts for several cases highlighting all the power imbalances at work in a given display, as well as contextualising the imbalances and the full historic experiences that led to the material ending up in the Pitt Rivers Museum.

She also helps with public engagement events, and has developed the Tippex Tour, during which she highlights objects whose historic labels had an offensive word Tippexed out, but were otherwise left unchanged. She uses these objects as ways into discussions of labelling, language and decolonisation.

Whenever I speak to groups about the collections or the museum, I, and many of my collections colleagues, acknowledge very openly and early on how problematic the history of the collection is, and that language used by the museum is old, out-dated, and offensive in many cases.

We acknowledge that over the years information that was wrong when it was passed to the museum, or when it was created by the museum, has since fossilised into fact.

Therefore there are probably many mistakes.

We encourage people who have correct information to contact us and direct us on where to find the correct information or feel empowered to correct us.

When the material is visited, especially by originating communities, we try to provide as much access as possible, and with as few interventions as possible. For instance, originating communities are absolutely not expected to wear gloves and can handle the objects.

This does have the unfortunate caveat that because dangerous horrible pesticides were historically used on material, gloves are provided for the visitor’s protection. However, they are informed that if they prefer not to wear them, that is fine. We encourage handwashing thoroughly afterwards.

This is prohibitive, unfortunately, especially for objects that require exposure to mouths and noses, such as playing musical instruments, for example. But when two Haida men were visiting the Haida and Salish collections earlier this year, they put on head pieces, and blankets and aprons, they shook rattles and held paddles and knives in their hands to understand their weight and grip and the sense that comes with holding important pieces.

We retrieved objects from displays during the hours that the public were in the museum, which is not considered good security practice, but when originating community members travel so far, it is extremely hard to justify certain protocols.

In terms of the catalogue database, we’re moving to a new database over the next 18 to 24 months, which will allow us more room to link more metadata to an object’s biography.

So, academic researchers will have space, as will specialist curators, originating communities, diaspora communities, and communities for whom an object may have no cultural connection but who have other connections or interpretations of it.

In addition, we are going to create a new thesaurus of contemporary, appropriate cultural group names. How we gather this information and how it is used appropriately will be a learning curve, and I expect there will be missteps along the way.

In the collections section, we don’t shy away from mistakes, and we try to support each other, both to not make them if possible, but to deal with the fallout when they do occur.

It is an excruciating feeling to know that you’ve caused more pain, embarrassment, or upset by making a mistake, especially if you feel that you have tried to do things properly. Bsometimes it is the only way to get it right in the long run and to redefine your perspective.

This is a profession that shouldn’t be stagnant. It needs to be challenged and stretched and pushed to its limit.

Our work should always be changing. Engagement teams are doing incredible work bringing in new audiences who in turn demand to be seen or heard. Those audiences force collections teams to respond and provide access to physical collections and the metadata associated with them in new ways.

The hurdles come in terms of really listening to audiences and communities, and then finding new and innovative ways to make that happen. This includes adapting required tools, like databases, and accepted procedures relating to access and handling, to reflect the cultural protocols and community voices being shared.