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Welcome to the Rivers Museums. Matters of Policy podcast, this is a podcast in which we explore the museum's collections development policy,

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speaking with guests from across the globe to delve into the language used and consider what really matters in this policy.

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Content warning this episode discusses issues surrounding Canadian residential schools and colonial harm to indigenous communities.

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Hi, it's Megan. I'm here with Alexis today to interview master carver Kari Newman.

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Professor Newman is an indigenous, multidisciplinary scholar and artist who works at the University of Victoria.

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His most famous work is called The Witness Blanket, which sheds light on Canada's history of indigenous genocide.

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He's here today to talk about pathways forward for the museum.

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Just to get started, I'd like to do a quick blend acknowledgement just because I am on indigenous land today.

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So I am a white settler of Celtic and British descent living on Treaty one territory, which is the traditional lands of the Anishinaabe,

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the new Ajiboye, the new Cree OG, Cree Denny and Dakota peoples, as well as the homeland of the multi-nation.

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And obviously, I acknowledge that colonialism and genocide continues to deeply harm indigenous communities in the land now called Canada,

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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.

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I just want to introduce myself and my traditional way, you know,

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Keri Newman came on board from E House Kingdom through my father and Coca-Cola from Cracker Jacks,

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and while about clowns of Northern Vancouver Island and Coast Salish from Charm of the Stalin nation along Upper Fraser Valley,

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both of which are places in what is now called British Columbia, Canada through my mother,

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my ancestors are settlers of English, Irish and Scottish Heritage,

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and I'm coming to you today from the traditional territories of the Commons speaking people which are now called Victoria British Columbia.

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So onto your question, our question is how do you feel that museums going forward can better acknowledge the emotional and

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spiritual connexion between objects and people because the current policy doesn't really do that?

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I was reading through the policy manual that you sent,

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and it's interesting because you can sort of see a couple of different things happening at the same time, right?

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Like there's this dislike, pragmatic approach to like the the finances of and resources of a museum, right?

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And then there's another layer where there's this attention paid to the origin of the object,

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but not necessarily like all the way back to where it came from,

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but who has it right now and who's donating it or where the funds came from to acquire it?

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So like sort of noticing in there that that's kind of in second places,

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we must make sure that our donors are well taken care of in all the decisions we make.

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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.

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That would be my first consideration on every on everything.

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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.

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And that's like such a final kind of and like, get rid of that.

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That's what that means, right? Like when I dispose of something, I throw it in the trash.

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And so I see that language throughout the document thinking, Wow, all right.

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That's that's kind of a final way of looking at it and started to imagine what it would be like.

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Well, and maybe we'll get into that a little bit further forward into the conversation,

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but I don't think of my relationship with the objects of the materials that I encounter as being transactional.

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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.

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With the spirit in dialogue, and I have a responsibility to treat it in the best way possible.

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And for me, that comes out of cultural teachings, right? So in the case of another project,

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you did called a witness blanket where I was bringing in objects from residential schools for residential school survivors,

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churches, government buildings as a in an effort to kind of record the truth of the history of residential school in Canada.

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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.

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I mean, it still informs around how to build the work of art, but also in what happens next.

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So and in my case,

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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.

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And so it now is in the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and as part of an exhibition called Preserving the Legacy.

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And the museum is undergoing the process of conservation of the blanket while it's

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set up there to to ensure that it's around for as long as it's supposed to be.

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I think that sort of leads us into our next question,

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which was about the witness blankets your work with the witness blanket birthed a unique agreement with the CM H.R.

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Can you tell us a little bit more about that,

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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?

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Sure. What I was just saying about my relationship with the pieces and the stories of the Carrie and the

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people who gave them that is what led me to the decision to make the kind of agreement that we made.

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We call it a stewardship agreement. It's it's a written contract and an oral agreement.

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The oral aspect of the agreement was what you say, initiated or enacted through ceremony.

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But the sort of core principle of the agreement is that nobody owns the blanket.

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That all rights associated with the agreement rests with the blanket and those pieces and the stories that

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it carries and that we instead of negotiating rights like so often happen in that kind of a contract,

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we we negotiated responsibility. And in doing so, we.

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Outlined the parameters of our relationship.

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My relationship with the museum. But we're also alarmed our the parameters of our relationship with the object, with the witness blanket.

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And then by enacting this whole thing through ceremony,

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we invited community in through the act of witnessing to take part in that stewardship with us.

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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,

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to not think of it even as property or a possession. And so actually, when I was reading through the policy manual,

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I was thinking about the places in which the stipulations of what will and will not occur based

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on this policy would at the very least inhibit this kind of an agreement because it said,

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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,

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they might take it in for a little while and then move it along, which could open the door for this kind of agreement.

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But this this focus on preservation, having by my read of it preservation, meaning that the object itself is intact forever.

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I don't think that's the intention of my work. I sort of follow this principle that I told them.

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This made to go back into the Earth and it tells the story is meant to tell for

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the time that it's here and then it clears space for totems of the future.

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And if I apply that to the witness blanket, then the job of the witness blanket is to tell people about residential school

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history and if and when we get to the point where that's well enough known,

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it doesn't need to to do that work anymore and it can be put to rest.

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That doesn't fit into this policy of preservation at all costs.

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I have a story about a mask that belongs to my family,

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that's in the Museum of Ethnology in Berlin that I can share because it relates really deeply to this question of preservation.

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The Damascus called the Nucleus Mosque, and it's the my last name is Newman.

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That was the anglicised version of Nautilus, and the mask depicts our ancestor like our origin story of our family and village.

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It's a transformation massive that starts out as the chief and then the chief opens.

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And inside there's a grizzly bear and the grizzly bear, according to legend,

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cleared the mouth of the river, allowing this to go up and set up our our village in my culture.

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When we potlatch, we have what we call a box of treasures, and in that box of treasures are our cultural objects like masks.

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When it's time to Potlatch,

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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.

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And then we have our our our products in the morning. And when the ceremony is done, we do the opposite.

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We send them back to sleep. We wrap them in blankets and we place them back into the box.

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When I went to see this mask in the museum in Berlin, at first I was struck by its beauty.

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Because you can see the tool marks and the skill of the car over, and so that's where I was.

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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.

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But then I was like drawn in like I always am, and I wanted to reach out and touch, hold it.

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I wanted to answer it. But there's glass, right? It's a museum.

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It has this beautiful lighting and it's this perfectly climate controlled cube.

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And it was at that point where I started to think about like, Well, when does it get to sleep?

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Right? That's what we do with our masks. We we let them sleep.

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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.

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And so so that was kind of like starting to sink in for me.

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And then I asked what the possibility would be to bring the mask home on loan for a potluck.

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And their response was surprising.

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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,

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the others in my uncle's box of treasures. So I had this idea of seeing these three generations of masks dance together.

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And the answer was, well, even if we could lend it to you, which is unlikely to do extremely valuable.

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So there's the economic consideration, right? We can't let it go because it's too expensive.

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Something might happen to it,

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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,

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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.

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So what is the object if it is no longer able to fulfil its purpose?

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And what is in our belief system? That object has a spirit.

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What happens to the spirit of of the movie's mask? When?

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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?

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Because I think for me what I think about preservation, I don't just think about object,

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I think about the dance that goes with the song that it goes with.

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I think about the ceremony that surrounds it, and all of that is part of the meaning, the knowledge that needs to be preserved.

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And if it can no longer interact in that way,

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then I think that only one small aspect of what that object is or what the culture is is being preserved.

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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.

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How do you save?

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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,

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which is medicine sage, which is medicine.

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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,

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but in some cases when it comes from our particular cultural place,

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thinking about or learning about and applying how it should be cared for, according to that culture.

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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

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didn't come up with the notion with with applying this notion of of objects,

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having the spirit and then carrying that through a process like conservation,

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a process like a transaction that sets up a stewardship agreement where nobody owns it.

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We all share responsibility for it and it all comes out of that, right?

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So anyway, that's a I know I kind of meandered off into a little side channel there.

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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.

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That is what you were talking about, you know,

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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.

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And the policy doesn't really incorporate or acknowledge the social lives of objects.

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The emphasis in the policy is this very western notion of preservation.

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I guess my question is how do you think museums can better incorporate the social lives

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of objects and indigenous ways of knowing in their collection policies going forward?

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I know like resources, both time and money are part of a consideration that any institution has to weigh in making these decisions.

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But I think something as simple as changing your relationship or the way you see

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your relationship with an object can go a long way to transformation of of policy.

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If a collection is only something that is housed within some designated parameters, whether it's building,

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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.

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But if if a collection can be more open than that, if it can exist in multiple different places in the world,

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then think about any painter, any historical artist.

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There's a body of work that's made by that person that's considered a collection, but.

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Very rarely does one institution hold all of a single collection, so in changing the way you think about relationship with objects.

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I think you can change maybe the perception of what a collection is and lose some this need, as you said,

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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,

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of a collection of knowledge that don't live with the holder of the collection with the keeper of the collection anymore.

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There's a few different things, I think in your question that could be that could be utilised.

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I was speaking about in our culture this sort of idea of objects having agency.

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I think that's where this this idea comes from.

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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.

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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.

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So I was speaking with someone recently and they said to me that dreams unite and visions divide.

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And when I was reading this policy, I thought about how that statement would apply to this because early on,

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it says that the Pitt Rivers Museum would like to be the best in the world.

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And that's a dream, right? And then I started reading through the policy and I started seeing all of these points,

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and those points are the vision or our vision of how to achieve that.

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But I think that that's where the dream starts to become hazy, right?

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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.

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The way that that the way that when you start to articulate a point after point after point and you say,

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well, well here to this law here and these standards there that.

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When you go back to the dream, maybe sometimes these different standards and policies conflict with,

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say, for instance, and in my case, acting in the best interest of the object itself.

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And that's part of the sort of perspective that that I grew up with here in

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this territory where we have this respect for the past or we honour the past,

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we respect the present and we take responsibility for the future.

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So that's kind of wrapped up in what a museum does from an archive does.

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And then how do you make room for the problematic ways that some things are collected?

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How do you honour your responsibility to two objects?

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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.

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And I totally understand with and agree with the intention of that policy.

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But I was imagining what if the museum had an opportunity to acquire something for the purpose of repatriation?

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How many opportunities will be passed up by this policy to set right?

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Something that was done in the past, a wrong that was done because of this policy, because they can't take it in.

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But if you had responsibility to object to the history of the object, then you might if resources allowed,

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take it in and then not dispose of it, but move it alarm to the community of origin.

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And then one last thought I had when I was thinking about this whole notion of disposal and

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repatriation was that and it fit into this idea of expanding what a collection could be

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is if an object is passed back through repatriation and the loss of having it physically

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present in the museum isn't seen as it being removed from the collection of knowledge.

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It's also the act of working with the community of origin can be an opportunity to develop relationship with the

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community itself and to to continue if resources allow to watch and record the development of the history of that object.

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And I know that's probably a nightmare logistically to think through.

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But when when you start to then add in technology and like the fact that we all have pretty great

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cameras in our phones now and we have different ways of uploading and transmitting information,

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there could be a way of of maintaining that relationship over time and growing the

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body of knowledge that is made available to the public and to students for study.

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Even though the object isn't there anymore. Right.

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And actually enrich that knowledge because it's continuing to grow because the mask is dancing in the as again.

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Yes. Also for the benefit of, well, myself because I'm not entirely clear on the subject,

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but also for future listeners who might not know what a potluck potluck potluck, potlatch, potlatch.

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For the benefit of listeners who might not be clear on that concept, would you mind explaining that to us a little bit?

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Sure. Potlatch is a term that we use for ceremony here in Michael Quarterback. territory, and it's the best way to describe it.

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It's sort of our system of governance, but it's also it's where we we take care of the business of society.

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Marriages happen, agreements are made, treaties are struck, and all of it happens within a big house.

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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.

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None can happen without the other. So a mask that we dance can tell a story and become part of an agreement.

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And the song that accompanies the dance speaks to that.

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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.

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The museum holds the artwork over here. We do our law in the courthouse, right?

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This is a place where all of these things kind of mash together and communities

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would come together to to work out differences and celebrate or memorialise.

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Excellent. Thank you so much. Of course, I haven't verified that.

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I asked you that question in particular because in my limited Canadian indigenous history knowledge,

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I had understood it to be something entirely different. So it's fantastic to get that perspective.

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And speaking of perspectives, that leads us very well into another question that.

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We had I'm sure you noted in the policy,

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and we did discuss it a little bit at the beginning that there is very little discussion of the original owners of these artefacts.

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Very little discussion of who actually made these pieces that now adorn the museum's collection.

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So as an artist yourself, how would you like to see artists and the original owners of these belongings incorporated into

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collections practises because the museum is now embarking on a more contemporary collecting idea?

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And do you have any ideas of how they can incorporate the notions of not just past artists,

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but sort of living and contemporary artists into their policy? Oh, this is such a big question.

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I think that in my case, the I've taken my lead instruction from my community.

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So when I think about the artwork I make, I don't think about it so much as being proprietary.

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I think of it as an expression of. A cultural expression that comes from that's passed down and through me.

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And so I have an interest in some of the work that I make because it's my interpretation of that,

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but I don't get to completely disassociate my responsibility to community in

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carrying out what this would become or how it was taken care of in the future.

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So I would say that I would place more importance in the cultural sense in my community than on me when when

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it comes to how to integrate something into a policy going forward to have two collections going forward.

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In the case of the witness blanket, where we had eight hundred and eighty six contributions,

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when we when we closed the project and started to make the blanket,

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it's that that number is growing because people have continued to make contributions.

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But that was the number when when we finished, I think the responsibility goes to that collective and trying to honour that collective.

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And this is revolves around residential schools, so you can talk about it as being a responsibility to residential school survivors

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and to share in the history or the truth of what happened to residential schools.

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That's where I place importance for that work. When it comes to, I told them that.

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I mean, I think it goes specifically back to my my home community and the way that say in the products,

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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.

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I don't want them to take up space from future generations because the story that

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I'm telling with them now is not necessarily going to be relevant in the future.

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And we see it happening right now in society where people are tearing down statues.

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Not today.

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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,

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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.

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It's time to create a different space for statues that memorialise something that

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we now recognise as being harmful to a large portion of the world population.

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That doesn't mean that it didn't happen, but I don't think that a that a statue is history.

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It's one one persons or one era's expression of a portion of history.

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So I think that back to the sort of core of your question about how artists and

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communities can be involved in in transforming the way the collection occurs.

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I think about the model of witness that sort of pretty deeply involved in a lot of

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the work that I do and the way that we practise culture here in Coca-Cola territory.

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And I think, well, how to witness this job is to listen and to reflect back what they've heard and then

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to act in a way that's in alignment or accordance to what they heard and shared.

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And I think that in there is is something that could inform a policy.

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It kind of changes the hierarchy of the museum's position.

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If the museum becomes a witness that has responsibility to the object and to society,

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then it's a balance between those things that informs the decision of how to care for an object, how to take it in.

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And I think that's maybe not exactly like but something close to what would come

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from a conversation with Coca-Cola people about how to do collection management,

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how to do acquisition. I think that would be.

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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,

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that ideal and how would that start to unbreak the power structure, the hierarchy of of the way that knowledge is held?

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I mean, when we're talking about historical objects, there's power.

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There is so much power held in in those objects in the knowledge that is within them.

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And so holding them could be wielded in a lot of different ways.

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Right. But if it were to adhere to that idea of witness and responsibility, then it doesn't get used as a cudgel.

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It becomes the basis for fulfilling that ideal of making.

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And I can't remember the exact words, but making this information,

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this knowledge available to the widest amount of people possible to the widest possible audience.

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Yeah. I think you sort of answered also our last question, which was,

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do you think or how do you think changing collections policies will help to disintegrate power structures between museums and communities?

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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.

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But that's where it all comes to you for me.

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And and maybe I'll turn it even back to the agreement with the Museum for Human Rights and how we maintain that relationship.

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Can we make joint decisions about as we make the right decisions about how to conserve the objects on the packet?

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We make joint decisions on how to curate, preserve and share the additional stories that go with it.

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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

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the objects thrown blanket hearing the stories of survivors walking through residential schools.

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And so we have like one hundred and sixty hours of video that digs deep into what happened in residential schools.

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What they what they were, what they look like, what it sounded like to walk through them,

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the kinds of memories that were evoked for survivors who are adults now when they walk through them.

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And that's incredibly like that's a whole collection in and of itself.

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And so we've been figuring out how to share that in a way that that honours the stories that

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we're told and tries to make sure that they don't just get tucked away because we made a,

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you know, like a 90 minute documentary. But 90 minutes doesn't begin to show everything that we that we gathered.

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It's it's the Coles notes version of of that portion of history.

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So there's that work, right? How do you how do you do that work together?

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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.

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In doing so, the museum is taking a leadership role, but not by dictating what happens by asking,

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listening and empowering me, empowering the words of survivors, empowering the maybe the objects themselves.

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I think that that's a pretty critical piece to this whole thing.

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In our ways, we have something called Qualcomm, and it's a metaphorical hook that hangs outside the door of a big house.

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And when you go in, you hang your ego there.

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And so you go in with humility.

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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.

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Right? And so I have always kind of had to always take a bit of issue with the idea of subject area

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expert because even a subject area expert really only has one perspective of that right.

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I would consider myself.

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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.

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So would it be in collections that wouldn't be in any of this?

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It would be maybe in like how to hold a knife for carving?

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I'm pretty good at that. The rest of it is, is me trying to translate the things that I hear from my elders,

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my family and then fitting that into the kinds of conversations that result from reading this

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policy manual and looking at the different words and seeing how sometimes they're in alignment.

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Sometimes they're they're in conflict with with a policy like or with the set of policies like that.

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So I think that's one big part. And I think that in this notion of talking about disposal, the act of repatriation,

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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.

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Yes, the policy itself, as I'm sure you know, as you read it, is very sparse on repatriation, partly due to necessity.

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There aren't any actual British guidelines as of yet to repatriation for museums in Canada.

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It's pretty well the same, though it's not been as much of a big topic as it has.

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Is it coming right now? So people are still sort of figuring out their own ways to do it,

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but we would love to hear sort of your final thoughts on this policy and ways that you personally would improve it.

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We would absolutely love to hear them. I'm just reading some of my notes here that I was making earlier.

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I think that I would just restate the idea of expanding the definition of collection and expanding the definition of preservation

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to include the possibility that something is still part of the Pitt Rivers Museum collection even after it has left the building,

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especially if it has led to a new and fruitful relationship.

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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,

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what was it called social lives of objects because knowledge is held in those social lives.

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Knowledge is generated from. The agreement with the Canadian Museum for Human Rights,

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the stewardship agreement was generated from the social lives of the objects on the witness blanket.

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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,

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with an artist and with an object in their collection.

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And it's lifted right up out of of a traditional perspective from a particular community because we went with concocting

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walkways when we were thinking through this agreement and we in the best way we could marry them with Western law.

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Maybe that the last part of that agreement that we didn't talk about that I'll share is the financial component.

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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.

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But I also didn't want to take anything material from the from the transaction.

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So what we said about was the aspiration of paying forward the same amount of money,

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at least the same amount of money that was invested by residential school survivors and making the witness Typekit to begin

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with because the the funds that came to me to make the blanket came through Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

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But it was designated by survivors themselves when they were negotiating the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement,

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and they set aside an allotment of money to go to commemoration. And that's where I applied with this idea for this blanket.

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And when I was successful, that money empowered this wealth of material history to be turned into an art project.

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And so that was the financial terms was to reinvest in the blanket itself and the legacy

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of the survivors at least the same amount of money that came to make the blanket.

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That is what is paying for the conservation status, what is paying for the digital projects to continue.

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It's turned into a replica of the blanket that is continuing the tour that we were unable to fulfil.

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And when the structure of the blanket started to fail. And lastly, it's turned into a legacy project.

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And so for the legacy project, I'm working to establish a centre for arts and decolonisation.

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Actually, I call it the Centre for Arts and Decolonisation,

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and we've committed a portion of the money from from the transaction to help start that centre.

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And that's what can happen if you reimagine what it means to acquire something you could.

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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,

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scholars from across disciplines to make artwork that continues that the ideal set out by survivors not just to commemorate residential schools,

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but to participate in reconciliation, to participate in decolonisation.

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So maybe I'll leave it, leave it there that the work of the agreement of the witness blanket is ongoing.

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And that's for me the coolest part of of being amidst that project is I still don't know where it will end.

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Excellent. And I know in particular, our mentor, Marika will be thrilled to hear about the UN Centre as well.

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That's something that's so fantastic. I'm sure we'll have to let her know about that, Alexis.

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I think she'll be just thrilled to hear about that. And thank you so much for coming to speak with us today.

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For some extremely poignant and insightful comments, both on this policy and on the state of museum decolonisation in general.

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It's just been fantastic to speak with you. Professor Newman, thank you very much for having me.

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It was really neat to read through and think through the things I'm I'm an artist and the West Coast of Canada,

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and I'm kind of led, as I said, by community or by that responsibility to community.

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And so whenever I have these opportunities to share in a wider context,

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I'm part bewildered, but also extremely grateful for these these chances to speak.

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So thank you for the opportunity. Absolutely. We were thrilled to speak with you.

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That was the Rivers Museum's Matters of Policy podcast produced by Jesse Woodhouse.

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Yet boom maker man Alexis Varela and Bhogle Sound Music by Jack Forcett voiceover Baiju, who led a special thank you to Marine.

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Some of them as the military exchange.