Decolonization of a museum?
- By Robert James Parsons
At a time when the vast colonial empires of the European powers have disappeared, the word “decolonization” has mostly slipped into the history books. Using it as the basis for an ethnography museum’s strategic four-year development plan would strike most people as strange – to say the least.
Yet this is exactly what Geneva’s Museum of Ethnography (MEG by its French acronym) decided to do. At a press conference in September 2020 to announce the plan’s launch, Boris Wastiau, the museum’s director, noted that, when the idea was first mooted two years previous, most of the museum’s staff were as ignorant of it as most of the public today. The subsequent time leading up to the launch involved much reflection and study, including a thorough reappraisal of very concept of ethnography and the role of the museum in it.
Notwithstanding its neutrality, Switzerland was not at all peripheral to the “colonial adventure”, for not only were many Swiss “adventurers” involved in exploring and exploiting the conquered territories, but Swiss bankers were fulsome in their financial support of such undertakings, establishing letters of credit for the various commercial enterprises driving them. It will thus come as no surprise that the MEG’s splendid collections are largely a result of these Swiss-banker-endorsed incursions and their concomitant plunder.
As for ethnography, the ethnographers now (finally!) admit that it is a European concept involving the study of foreign cultures in a way that often has little to do with the lands and cultures that it purports to study, for the entire approach is peculiarly Eurocentric and often involves a shocking disregard for the peoples whose cultures created these objects and endowed them with meaning. Secure in the belief of their superiority, the Europeans and their descendants in lands that they colonized helped themselves to innumerable artifacts. These ranged from what the takers considered “curiosities” of no monetary value, acquired as souvenirs, to priceless art objects.
As Boris Wastiau pointed out on numerous occasions, the reconsideration of ethnography has spawned a vast reconsideration of the entire “colonial adventure”. A closely related product of this adventure was the development of geology as a science, born out of the need to survey and sound the land thus brought under colonial control for the riches of its substratum.
The project launched in 2020 echoes many such under way in ethnography museums elsewhere in the world and involves exploring ways to try to set things right and place the formerly colonized peoples at the center of their histories and cultures. This, in turn, has resulted in a firm acknowledgement that the acquired objects can – and often do – have a value that a Western-centered “primitive art” market has no way of appreciating.
In short, as in the case of a tiny dark spot in a pitted glass case, reputed to be the relic of a saint of Christianity, the lack of an inherent monetary value under the terms of such markets is irrelevant. It is up to those who created these objects and gave them meaning to establish their value.
This “examination of conscience” has opened the door to a vast project across the world, only now slowly getting under way, to actually restore many of these objects to the peoples and the societies that created and treasured them.
This brings us up to the present, for on 7 February 2023, the MEG officially returned a mask and sacred rattle to representatives of the Haudenosaunee Confederation, whose lands, in a testimony to the violence done to the colonized, are now divided between Canada and the United States. The Confederation, also known as the Iroquois Confederation of the Six Nations is one of the oldest continually running political entities in the world, with a constitution established well before the arrival of any Europeans. They – and their names – are among the best known of the North American First Nations: the Senecas, the Cayugas, the Oneidas, the Onondagas, the Mohawks and the Tuscaroras.
The two objects were acquired, as the current, circumspect declaration of the museum puts it, without consent. Amédée-Pierre Jule Pictet de Sergy (1795 – 1888), a Geneva historian and politician, donated them in 1825 to the Musée académique, whose collections were transferred to the MEG upon its creation in 1901.
Last July, Brennen Ferguson, a member of the Exterior Relations Committee of the Haudenosaunee and a member of the Tuscarora Nation, was in Geneva and took advantage of the occasion to visit the MEG’s collections. At the restitution ceremony, he recounted to the packed MEG auditorium that, upon seeing the mask and rattle, he was overcome with great sorrow at the thought that they had been sundered from their native land for some 200 years. He added that the mask had not been properly “cared for”, in particular through its use as a means of transmitting language.
The cultural status of both objects belongs formally to the Haudenosaunee Confederation, who consider it improper to exhibit them, for they are seen as protectors of the well-being of the Confederation.
Accompanied by Kenneth Deer of the Mohawk Nation, Kenneth Ferguson appealed to the MEG’s current director, Carine Ayélé Durand, who had them removed from their showcase on the following day. In August, the MEG received an official request for the restitution of the objects, which was passed along to the Administrative Council of the City of Geneva, which ratified it already on 12 October.
Manifestly impressed, Kenneth Deer pointed out that ordinarily this sort of request resulted in a long, drawn-out procedure.
Clayton Logan of the Seneca Nation presided over the burning of tobacco during which he explained to the objects – in the original Seneca language – what was happening to them. It is worth noting that tobacco is also a sacred object for these Nations, used in all sorts of ceremonies (such as smoking the peace pipe to conclude an agreement ending conflict and opening reconciliation). This part of the ceremony, at the request of the Haudenosaunee representatives, was not allowed to be filmed, unlike the rest of the ceremony.
Carine Ayélé Durand was emphatic that this was merely the first step in what promises to be a long, complicated process of re-examination at the MEG in search of its becoming what she called “a culturally sustainable museum”.
The occasion coincides with the centenary of the arrival in Geneva of the Iroquois chief Deskaheh in an attempt to make known at the Assembly of the newly created League of Nations the loss of the First Nations’ autonomy, the destruction of their cultural institutions and their outright dispossession. He was refused this honor, but, in memory of his effort, the day after the MEG ceremony, a “peace tree”, given by the Haudenosaunee Confederation to the City of Geneva, was planted in the parc des Bastions (the City’s original botanical garden and now the central University campus).
And on the Friday preceding the ceremony, the MEG received a delegation from Nigeria within the context of the initiative Bénin en Suisse under way with eight Swiss museums regarding objects from the Kingdom of Benin pillaged by British troops in 1897 on territory that became part of Nigeria. The MEG holds eight of the objects under consideration, and Carine Ayélé Durand has opined that the other museums will be receiving requests for restitution at some point. This broader undertaking is supported by the Swiss federal government and its Office of Cultural Affairs.
For its part, the City of Geneva, under its Director of Cultural Affairs, Sami Kaanan, has anchored the principle of restitution in its official policy, which involves, among other things, posting the City’s collections on line for examination and identification by possible original owners, and establishing contact with the communities from which the objects came.
ID Canada / ISSN 2563-818X (En ligne) – ISSN 2563-8181 (Imprimé)
