Welcome to the Rivers Museums. Matters of Policy podcast, this is a podcast in which we explore the museum's collections development policy,
speaking with guests from across the globe to delve into the language used and consider what really matters in this policy.
Content warning this episode discusses issues surrounding Canadian residential schools and colonial harm to indigenous communities.
Hi, it's Megan. I'm here with Alexis today to interview master carver Kari Newman.
Professor Newman is an indigenous, multidisciplinary scholar and artist who works at the University of Victoria.
His most famous work is called The Witness Blanket, which sheds light on Canada's history of indigenous genocide.
He's here today to talk about pathways forward for the museum.
Just to get started, I'd like to do a quick blend acknowledgement just because I am on indigenous land today.
So I am a white settler of Celtic and British descent living on Treaty one territory, which is the traditional lands of the Anishinaabe,
the new Ajiboye, the new Cree OG, Cree Denny and Dakota peoples, as well as the homeland of the multi-nation.
And obviously, I acknowledge that colonialism and genocide continues to deeply harm indigenous communities in the land now called Canada,
and I'm committed to listening and doing the work and learning as much as I can in the service of truth, reconciliation and restitution.
I just want to introduce myself and my traditional way, you know,
Keri Newman came on board from E House Kingdom through my father and Coca-Cola from Cracker Jacks,
and while about clowns of Northern Vancouver Island and Coast Salish from Charm of the Stalin nation along Upper Fraser Valley,
both of which are places in what is now called British Columbia, Canada through my mother,
my ancestors are settlers of English, Irish and Scottish Heritage,
and I'm coming to you today from the traditional territories of the Commons speaking people which are now called Victoria British Columbia.
So onto your question, our question is how do you feel that museums going forward can better acknowledge the emotional and
spiritual connexion between objects and people because the current policy doesn't really do that?
I was reading through the policy manual that you sent,
and it's interesting because you can sort of see a couple of different things happening at the same time, right?
Like there's this dislike, pragmatic approach to like the the finances of and resources of a museum, right?
And then there's another layer where there's this attention paid to the origin of the object,
but not necessarily like all the way back to where it came from,
but who has it right now and who's donating it or where the funds came from to acquire it?
So like sort of noticing in there that that's kind of in second places,
we must make sure that our donors are well taken care of in all the decisions we make.
And for me, I would flip that a little bit and I would place primary importance on the object itself and the community that it came from.
That would be my first consideration on every on everything.
Yeah, it's it's it's fascinating to to listen to the language or to read the language and hear see terms like disposal.
And that's like such a final kind of and like, get rid of that.
That's what that means, right? Like when I dispose of something, I throw it in the trash.
And so I see that language throughout the document thinking, Wow, all right.
That's that's kind of a final way of looking at it and started to imagine what it would be like.
Well, and maybe we'll get into that a little bit further forward into the conversation,
but I don't think of my relationship with the objects of the materials that I encounter as being transactional.
I think of them as being. Relational, so if I acquire a tree, turn it into a totem, I'm in a relationship with that mark.
With the spirit in dialogue, and I have a responsibility to treat it in the best way possible.
And for me, that comes out of cultural teachings, right? So in the case of another project,
you did called a witness blanket where I was bringing in objects from residential schools for residential school survivors,
churches, government buildings as a in an effort to kind of record the truth of the history of residential school in Canada.
I formed a relationship with each of the people who gave the objects with the objects themselves, and that is what informed my decision making around.
I mean, it still informs around how to build the work of art, but also in what happens next.
So and in my case,
I went on tour to try and get it back to the community as it came from and eventually needed to be installed somewhere semi-permanent.
And so it now is in the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and as part of an exhibition called Preserving the Legacy.
And the museum is undergoing the process of conservation of the blanket while it's
set up there to to ensure that it's around for as long as it's supposed to be.
I think that sort of leads us into our next question,
which was about the witness blankets your work with the witness blanket birthed a unique agreement with the CM H.R.
Can you tell us a little bit more about that,
about how you think museums can develop or continue this kind of work going forward and the sort of impacts that you think it has had?
Sure. What I was just saying about my relationship with the pieces and the stories of the Carrie and the
people who gave them that is what led me to the decision to make the kind of agreement that we made.
We call it a stewardship agreement. It's it's a written contract and an oral agreement.
The oral aspect of the agreement was what you say, initiated or enacted through ceremony.
But the sort of core principle of the agreement is that nobody owns the blanket.
That all rights associated with the agreement rests with the blanket and those pieces and the stories that
it carries and that we instead of negotiating rights like so often happen in that kind of a contract,
we we negotiated responsibility. And in doing so, we.
Outlined the parameters of our relationship.
My relationship with the museum. But we're also alarmed our the parameters of our relationship with the object, with the witness blanket.
And then by enacting this whole thing through ceremony,
we invited community in through the act of witnessing to take part in that stewardship with us.
And so the goal of this is for us to act always in the best interest of the blanket itself to not think about the transactional value,
to not think of it even as property or a possession. And so actually, when I was reading through the policy manual,
I was thinking about the places in which the stipulations of what will and will not occur based
on this policy would at the very least inhibit this kind of an agreement because it said,
I think that the museum will not acquire something unless it can have clear title and that if in some cases where it's deemed important enough,
they might take it in for a little while and then move it along, which could open the door for this kind of agreement.
But this this focus on preservation, having by my read of it preservation, meaning that the object itself is intact forever.
I don't think that's the intention of my work. I sort of follow this principle that I told them.
This made to go back into the Earth and it tells the story is meant to tell for
the time that it's here and then it clears space for totems of the future.
And if I apply that to the witness blanket, then the job of the witness blanket is to tell people about residential school
history and if and when we get to the point where that's well enough known,
it doesn't need to to do that work anymore and it can be put to rest.
That doesn't fit into this policy of preservation at all costs.
I have a story about a mask that belongs to my family,
that's in the Museum of Ethnology in Berlin that I can share because it relates really deeply to this question of preservation.
The Damascus called the Nucleus Mosque, and it's the my last name is Newman.
That was the anglicised version of Nautilus, and the mask depicts our ancestor like our origin story of our family and village.
It's a transformation massive that starts out as the chief and then the chief opens.
And inside there's a grizzly bear and the grizzly bear, according to legend,
cleared the mouth of the river, allowing this to go up and set up our our village in my culture.
When we potlatch, we have what we call a box of treasures, and in that box of treasures are our cultural objects like masks.
When it's time to Potlatch,
we open the box of treasures and we wake up the masks by singing to them and unwrapping them from the blankets and taking them out.
And then we have our our our products in the morning. And when the ceremony is done, we do the opposite.
We send them back to sleep. We wrap them in blankets and we place them back into the box.
When I went to see this mask in the museum in Berlin, at first I was struck by its beauty.
Because you can see the tool marks and the skill of the car over, and so that's where I was.
I'm a carver. I was looking at this as a carver and appreciating, you know, well over 100 years ago, one of my ancestors making this work.
But then I was like drawn in like I always am, and I wanted to reach out and touch, hold it.
I wanted to answer it. But there's glass, right? It's a museum.
It has this beautiful lighting and it's this perfectly climate controlled cube.
And it was at that point where I started to think about like, Well, when does it get to sleep?
Right? That's what we do with our masks. We we let them sleep.
But this mask has light on it at all times. It's in this cage and it can't be held or something to even.
And so so that was kind of like starting to sink in for me.
And then I asked what the possibility would be to bring the mask home on loan for a potluck.
And their response was surprising.
And I had this kind of idea because there's two other versions of that mask existence ones at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC in Vancouver,
the others in my uncle's box of treasures. So I had this idea of seeing these three generations of masks dance together.
And the answer was, well, even if we could lend it to you, which is unlikely to do extremely valuable.
So there's the economic consideration, right? We can't let it go because it's too expensive.
Something might happen to it,
then it would be impossible for you to ever dams it because it's been treated with poison to ensure its preservation, which I guess is,
is or was maybe was a standard practise at a time, and that the focus of the preservation was to maintain the object as a whole, but not the purpose.
So what is the object if it is no longer able to fulfil its purpose?
And what is in our belief system? That object has a spirit.
What happens to the spirit of of the movie's mask? When?
When you apply poison to save it, do you save it or does it end up turning it into a shell of what it was meant to be?
Because I think for me what I think about preservation, I don't just think about object,
I think about the dance that goes with the song that it goes with.
I think about the ceremony that surrounds it, and all of that is part of the meaning, the knowledge that needs to be preserved.
And if it can no longer interact in that way,
then I think that only one small aspect of what that object is or what the culture is is being preserved.
And so that kind of feeds into this relationship with the witness blanket and this preserving the legacy and all the decisions that are being made in.
How do you save?
How do you preserve a blanket when it's got braids of hair hockey skates a shoe that's deteriorating because it was found in the woods sweetgrass,
which is medicine sage, which is medicine.
It's got so many different kinds of of material on there, and we're thinking through not only how to care for the object in the best way,
but in some cases when it comes from our particular cultural place,
thinking about or learning about and applying how it should be cared for, according to that culture.
So it's a it's an enormous task, but it's been really enlightening to kind of come up with this notion of not I
didn't come up with the notion with with applying this notion of of objects,
having the spirit and then carrying that through a process like conservation,
a process like a transaction that sets up a stewardship agreement where nobody owns it.
We all share responsibility for it and it all comes out of that, right?
So anyway, that's a I know I kind of meandered off into a little side channel there.
But now that that was fabulous in our discussions of of the policy, what comes up a lot is what we call the social lives of objects.
That is what you were talking about, you know,
the spirits of an object about them having lives other than and a purpose other than just being presented in the museum in a climate controlled cube.
And the policy doesn't really incorporate or acknowledge the social lives of objects.
The emphasis in the policy is this very western notion of preservation.
I guess my question is how do you think museums can better incorporate the social lives
of objects and indigenous ways of knowing in their collection policies going forward?
I know like resources, both time and money are part of a consideration that any institution has to weigh in making these decisions.
But I think something as simple as changing your relationship or the way you see
your relationship with an object can go a long way to transformation of of policy.
If a collection is only something that is housed within some designated parameters, whether it's building,
whether it's an archive and it can only be part of the collection if it's owned by the collection keeper, then that's kind of limiting.
But if if a collection can be more open than that, if it can exist in multiple different places in the world,
then think about any painter, any historical artist.
There's a body of work that's made by that person that's considered a collection, but.
Very rarely does one institution hold all of a single collection, so in changing the way you think about relationship with objects.
I think you can change maybe the perception of what a collection is and lose some this need, as you said,
this sort of western idea of of preservation and collection and open it a little bit so that it has room for four objects to still be part of,
of a collection of knowledge that don't live with the holder of the collection with the keeper of the collection anymore.
There's a few different things, I think in your question that could be that could be utilised.
I was speaking about in our culture this sort of idea of objects having agency.
I think that's where this this idea comes from.
For me that then we're not thinking of ourselves as the who's the owners over top of something, but we think of ourselves more in relationship with.
And then you're not being guided by all these other sort of the financial aspect and this this notion of permanency, but you could still like fulfil.
So I was speaking with someone recently and they said to me that dreams unite and visions divide.
And when I was reading this policy, I thought about how that statement would apply to this because early on,
it says that the Pitt Rivers Museum would like to be the best in the world.
And that's a dream, right? And then I started reading through the policy and I started seeing all of these points,
and those points are the vision or our vision of how to achieve that.
But I think that that's where the dream starts to become hazy, right?
Because it's it starts to inhibit itself in some ways that I just thought of thought of that when I was reading through the policy.
The way that that the way that when you start to articulate a point after point after point and you say,
well, well here to this law here and these standards there that.
When you go back to the dream, maybe sometimes these different standards and policies conflict with,
say, for instance, and in my case, acting in the best interest of the object itself.
And that's part of the sort of perspective that that I grew up with here in
this territory where we have this respect for the past or we honour the past,
we respect the present and we take responsibility for the future.
So that's kind of wrapped up in what a museum does from an archive does.
And then how do you make room for the problematic ways that some things are collected?
How do you honour your responsibility to two objects?
I don't know if this fits in, but I also read in the policy about how the museum won't acquire something unless it can be certain of its origin.
And I totally understand with and agree with the intention of that policy.
But I was imagining what if the museum had an opportunity to acquire something for the purpose of repatriation?
How many opportunities will be passed up by this policy to set right?
Something that was done in the past, a wrong that was done because of this policy, because they can't take it in.
But if you had responsibility to object to the history of the object, then you might if resources allowed,
take it in and then not dispose of it, but move it alarm to the community of origin.
And then one last thought I had when I was thinking about this whole notion of disposal and
repatriation was that and it fit into this idea of expanding what a collection could be
is if an object is passed back through repatriation and the loss of having it physically
present in the museum isn't seen as it being removed from the collection of knowledge.
It's also the act of working with the community of origin can be an opportunity to develop relationship with the
community itself and to to continue if resources allow to watch and record the development of the history of that object.
And I know that's probably a nightmare logistically to think through.
But when when you start to then add in technology and like the fact that we all have pretty great
cameras in our phones now and we have different ways of uploading and transmitting information,
there could be a way of of maintaining that relationship over time and growing the
body of knowledge that is made available to the public and to students for study.
Even though the object isn't there anymore. Right.
And actually enrich that knowledge because it's continuing to grow because the mask is dancing in the as again.
Yes. Also for the benefit of, well, myself because I'm not entirely clear on the subject,
but also for future listeners who might not know what a potluck potluck potluck, potlatch, potlatch.
For the benefit of listeners who might not be clear on that concept, would you mind explaining that to us a little bit?
Sure. Potlatch is a term that we use for ceremony here in Michael Quarterback. territory, and it's the best way to describe it.
It's sort of our system of governance, but it's also it's where we we take care of the business of society.
Marriages happen, agreements are made, treaties are struck, and all of it happens within a big house.
All of it happens around a ceremonial fire. All of it is oral spoken and all forms of art, legal orders and governance mixed together in that space.
None can happen without the other. So a mask that we dance can tell a story and become part of an agreement.
And the song that accompanies the dance speaks to that.
So it's kind of a an amalgamation of so many different things that in current society, we hold separately, like the opera happens over there.
The museum holds the artwork over here. We do our law in the courthouse, right?
This is a place where all of these things kind of mash together and communities
would come together to to work out differences and celebrate or memorialise.
Excellent. Thank you so much. Of course, I haven't verified that.
I asked you that question in particular because in my limited Canadian indigenous history knowledge,
I had understood it to be something entirely different. So it's fantastic to get that perspective.
And speaking of perspectives, that leads us very well into another question that.
We had I'm sure you noted in the policy,
and we did discuss it a little bit at the beginning that there is very little discussion of the original owners of these artefacts.
Very little discussion of who actually made these pieces that now adorn the museum's collection.
So as an artist yourself, how would you like to see artists and the original owners of these belongings incorporated into
collections practises because the museum is now embarking on a more contemporary collecting idea?
And do you have any ideas of how they can incorporate the notions of not just past artists,
but sort of living and contemporary artists into their policy? Oh, this is such a big question.
I think that in my case, the I've taken my lead instruction from my community.
So when I think about the artwork I make, I don't think about it so much as being proprietary.
I think of it as an expression of. A cultural expression that comes from that's passed down and through me.
And so I have an interest in some of the work that I make because it's my interpretation of that,
but I don't get to completely disassociate my responsibility to community in
carrying out what this would become or how it was taken care of in the future.
So I would say that I would place more importance in the cultural sense in my community than on me when when
it comes to how to integrate something into a policy going forward to have two collections going forward.
In the case of the witness blanket, where we had eight hundred and eighty six contributions,
when we when we closed the project and started to make the blanket,
it's that that number is growing because people have continued to make contributions.
But that was the number when when we finished, I think the responsibility goes to that collective and trying to honour that collective.
And this is revolves around residential schools, so you can talk about it as being a responsibility to residential school survivors
and to share in the history or the truth of what happened to residential schools.
That's where I place importance for that work. When it comes to, I told them that.
I mean, I think it goes specifically back to my my home community and the way that say in the products,
we would determine what to do with something right? Like, I would like my totems that I make to go back into the Earth at some point.
I don't want them to take up space from future generations because the story that
I'm telling with them now is not necessarily going to be relevant in the future.
And we see it happening right now in society where people are tearing down statues.
Not today.
I agree with the methods all the time because that wouldn't be the way that I do it, but that's an expression of change and those actions there,
the knocking at the door saying, you know, it's time, it's time for us to to look at these things a little bit differently.
It's time to create a different space for statues that memorialise something that
we now recognise as being harmful to a large portion of the world population.
That doesn't mean that it didn't happen, but I don't think that a that a statue is history.
It's one one persons or one era's expression of a portion of history.
So I think that back to the sort of core of your question about how artists and
communities can be involved in in transforming the way the collection occurs.
I think about the model of witness that sort of pretty deeply involved in a lot of
the work that I do and the way that we practise culture here in Coca-Cola territory.
And I think, well, how to witness this job is to listen and to reflect back what they've heard and then
to act in a way that's in alignment or accordance to what they heard and shared.
And I think that in there is is something that could inform a policy.
It kind of changes the hierarchy of the museum's position.
If the museum becomes a witness that has responsibility to the object and to society,
then it's a balance between those things that informs the decision of how to care for an object, how to take it in.
And I think that's maybe not exactly like but something close to what would come
from a conversation with Coca-Cola people about how to do collection management,
how to do acquisition. I think that would be.
I mean, you never know how many different ways somebody can call, but that would be one that it kind of brings a smile to my face to think about that,
that ideal and how would that start to unbreak the power structure, the hierarchy of of the way that knowledge is held?
I mean, when we're talking about historical objects, there's power.
There is so much power held in in those objects in the knowledge that is within them.
And so holding them could be wielded in a lot of different ways.
Right. But if it were to adhere to that idea of witness and responsibility, then it doesn't get used as a cudgel.
It becomes the basis for fulfilling that ideal of making.
And I can't remember the exact words, but making this information,
this knowledge available to the widest amount of people possible to the widest possible audience.
Yeah. I think you sort of answered also our last question, which was,
do you think or how do you think changing collections policies will help to disintegrate power structures between museums and communities?
I kind of started it on that a little bit, and I feel like kind of a broken record to keep going back to relationship.
But that's where it all comes to you for me.
And and maybe I'll turn it even back to the agreement with the Museum for Human Rights and how we maintain that relationship.
Can we make joint decisions about as we make the right decisions about how to conserve the objects on the packet?
We make joint decisions on how to curate, preserve and share the additional stories that go with it.
I mean, in the making of that work, we also gathered maybe be call field recordings after reading your document of of the process of gathering
the objects thrown blanket hearing the stories of survivors walking through residential schools.
And so we have like one hundred and sixty hours of video that digs deep into what happened in residential schools.
What they what they were, what they look like, what it sounded like to walk through them,
the kinds of memories that were evoked for survivors who are adults now when they walk through them.
And that's incredibly like that's a whole collection in and of itself.
And so we've been figuring out how to share that in a way that that honours the stories that
we're told and tries to make sure that they don't just get tucked away because we made a,
you know, like a 90 minute documentary. But 90 minutes doesn't begin to show everything that we that we gathered.
It's it's the Coles notes version of of that portion of history.
So there's that work, right? How do you how do you do that work together?
So we've been pursuing that with the museum and with me and with other interested parties to bring it to life through technological means.
In doing so, the museum is taking a leadership role, but not by dictating what happens by asking,
listening and empowering me, empowering the words of survivors, empowering the maybe the objects themselves.
I think that that's a pretty critical piece to this whole thing.
In our ways, we have something called Qualcomm, and it's a metaphorical hook that hangs outside the door of a big house.
And when you go in, you hang your ego there.
And so you go in with humility.
And I think when you go into a situation with humility rather than trying to be an expert, it opens your ears and your heart to continual learning.
Right? And so I have always kind of had to always take a bit of issue with the idea of subject area
expert because even a subject area expert really only has one perspective of that right.
I would consider myself.
I would be very, very narrow in the description of anything that I would be called an expert in or that I would consider myself an expert in.
So would it be in collections that wouldn't be in any of this?
It would be maybe in like how to hold a knife for carving?
I'm pretty good at that. The rest of it is, is me trying to translate the things that I hear from my elders,
my family and then fitting that into the kinds of conversations that result from reading this
policy manual and looking at the different words and seeing how sometimes they're in alignment.
Sometimes they're they're in conflict with with a policy like or with the set of policies like that.
So I think that's one big part. And I think that in this notion of talking about disposal, the act of repatriation,
if it's allowed to be led by the community itself could be seen as a way of further breaking down hierarchy, further level of power.
Yes, the policy itself, as I'm sure you know, as you read it, is very sparse on repatriation, partly due to necessity.
There aren't any actual British guidelines as of yet to repatriation for museums in Canada.
It's pretty well the same, though it's not been as much of a big topic as it has.
Is it coming right now? So people are still sort of figuring out their own ways to do it,
but we would love to hear sort of your final thoughts on this policy and ways that you personally would improve it.
We would absolutely love to hear them. I'm just reading some of my notes here that I was making earlier.
I think that I would just restate the idea of expanding the definition of collection and expanding the definition of preservation
to include the possibility that something is still part of the Pitt Rivers Museum collection even after it has left the building,
especially if it has led to a new and fruitful relationship.
I think that the other one is its preservation. What does preservation mean if you take away the spirit of the purpose of a thing and this this idea,
what was it called social lives of objects because knowledge is held in those social lives.
Knowledge is generated from. The agreement with the Canadian Museum for Human Rights,
the stewardship agreement was generated from the social lives of the objects on the witness blanket.
And that's the thing of interest, right? It's a it's a whole different kind of of way of thinking about a museum's relationship with a community,
with an artist and with an object in their collection.
And it's lifted right up out of of a traditional perspective from a particular community because we went with concocting
walkways when we were thinking through this agreement and we in the best way we could marry them with Western law.
Maybe that the last part of that agreement that we didn't talk about that I'll share is the financial component.
Because in thinking through how to do a transaction that isn't one for possession, I didn't feel like it was appropriate just to give it over.
But I also didn't want to take anything material from the from the transaction.
So what we said about was the aspiration of paying forward the same amount of money,
at least the same amount of money that was invested by residential school survivors and making the witness Typekit to begin
with because the the funds that came to me to make the blanket came through Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
But it was designated by survivors themselves when they were negotiating the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement,
and they set aside an allotment of money to go to commemoration. And that's where I applied with this idea for this blanket.
And when I was successful, that money empowered this wealth of material history to be turned into an art project.
And so that was the financial terms was to reinvest in the blanket itself and the legacy
of the survivors at least the same amount of money that came to make the blanket.
That is what is paying for the conservation status, what is paying for the digital projects to continue.
It's turned into a replica of the blanket that is continuing the tour that we were unable to fulfil.
And when the structure of the blanket started to fail. And lastly, it's turned into a legacy project.
And so for the legacy project, I'm working to establish a centre for arts and decolonisation.
Actually, I call it the Centre for Arts and Decolonisation,
and we've committed a portion of the money from from the transaction to help start that centre.
And that's what can happen if you reimagine what it means to acquire something you could.
It can continue to generate new things. Because what I would like to see happen from this on centre is to empower artists, knowledge keepers,
scholars from across disciplines to make artwork that continues that the ideal set out by survivors not just to commemorate residential schools,
but to participate in reconciliation, to participate in decolonisation.
So maybe I'll leave it, leave it there that the work of the agreement of the witness blanket is ongoing.
And that's for me the coolest part of of being amidst that project is I still don't know where it will end.
Excellent. And I know in particular, our mentor, Marika will be thrilled to hear about the UN Centre as well.
That's something that's so fantastic. I'm sure we'll have to let her know about that, Alexis.
I think she'll be just thrilled to hear about that. And thank you so much for coming to speak with us today.
For some extremely poignant and insightful comments, both on this policy and on the state of museum decolonisation in general.
It's just been fantastic to speak with you. Professor Newman, thank you very much for having me.
It was really neat to read through and think through the things I'm I'm an artist and the West Coast of Canada,
and I'm kind of led, as I said, by community or by that responsibility to community.
And so whenever I have these opportunities to share in a wider context,
I'm part bewildered, but also extremely grateful for these these chances to speak.
So thank you for the opportunity. Absolutely. We were thrilled to speak with you.
That was the Rivers Museum's Matters of Policy podcast produced by Jesse Woodhouse.
Yet boom maker man Alexis Varela and Bhogle Sound Music by Jack Forcett voiceover Baiju, who led a special thank you to Marine.
Some of them as the military exchange.