Museum Collaboration Manifesto Jim Enote

Museum Collaboration Manifesto

Jim Enote

After many years working within museology we continue to see items in collections disguised with mistaken and unsuitable interpretations. With so much error many items gain false significance and meaning by the hand of outdated standards and practice. It is strange enough that things are removed from their local setting and context, now they have been renamed and reframed in languages and contexts foreign to the place and people from which they were born.

We are now finally witnessing efforts to improve staid systems of museum classification and accounting. Let us bury the fit-in-a-box orthodoxy of one structured and established system of classifying objects and archival materials. The current system is not even binary. It is not two systems; with one recognizing the other, it is one system. And I will say this. No one has a right to restrict what we name or label this thing or that.

Inclusion of expert peoples representing the source of collection materials is the keystone of a collaborative movement. Welcoming and respecting knowledge of objects by the makers and users of the objects does not change the objects. Why must we even offer an explanation? Has a museum or archive ever created objects in their collections?

In the spirit of just transition and responsibility, we will advocate for genuine, reliable, and virtuous collaboration. This is a higher order than many may be concerned with and implies that collaboration involves reaching out and enlightening on equal terms: to decentralize power and leadership and share problem solving. We will not oppose each other; rather we will enable one another and allow objects and people to speak. By virtue of pure collaboration we will pay tribute to voices of objects, as the objects should be perceived and understood.

The spirit of pure collaboration is righteous and undiluted with hesitancy and uncertainty. It is a movement and the number of colleagues that are attaining pure collaboration is additive and promising. These colleagues’ works are principled and noble and I applaud them and everyone associated with their ideas. 

Clearly, many old conventions in museum collection management, lexicon, and conservation have lost their purpose. If the field of museology is truly egalitarian and moving forward then there must be centrifugal answers to our problems. We will labor, co-labor, collaborate and co-elaborate from the fixed center. We are aware knowledges are transitory and fluid and the old systems supporting only one way of knowing are themselves artifacts of humanity’s misstep.

A new museum conservation dialogue has also emerged. In some situations let us appreciate the beauty of aging things. In collaboration with the desires of source communities and makers of objects, we will respect that some items in collections should fulfill their lifetime as naturally as possible. As we are fascinated with the age and seasoning of buildings and other structures, we can honor the aging of some objects. In this sense those items will reclaim their destinies. Concurrently, we will pay tribute to the impalpable nature and spiritual dynamics of objects together with the science of materials and their environments.

We are informed by many years of experience, we are serious people, and we are thinking differently from those that served before us. Surely, imaginative and unfamiliar concepts will be met with resistance, but when the tide goes out I imagine we will trust heretical notions as positive beacons that will enlighten the field of museology and manifest new accountability of all knowledges through pure collaboration.     

Jim Enote, Director

A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center

Jim Enote, Zuni tribal member

Zuni, New Mexico

Museum director, foundation director, and devoted land and water conservationist

I have been reflecting on conversations brought forth during the recent Encounters conference at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra and how those conversations evoked some fascinating and compelling ideas around collaborations with indigenous communities. The conversations included; the Museum Collaboration Manifesto, revisiting the promise of digital media in heritage learning, trafficking of sacred antiquities, power of maps, building relationships with archival material and physical objects, indigenous-led philanthropy, and creating indigenous-led national monuments/parks, to name just a few. I am planning a return to Australia in early August to meet again with a few of my Australian colleagues with the hope of taking the Canberra conversations to the next level.

JIM ENOTE

Jim is the director of the A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center and director of the Colorado Plateau Foundation. He serves on the boards of the Grand Canyon Trust and Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation and is a senior advisor for Mountain Cultures at the Mountain Institute. He is a National Geographic Society Explorer, a New Mexico Community Luminaria, and an E.F. Schumacher Society Fellow. Jim’s written work appears in Heritage In the Context of Globalization; Science, Technology, and Human Values; Sacredness as a Means to Conservation; Mapping Our Places; Indigenous People and Sustainable Development; People and Tourism in Fragile Environments; and Redrock Testimony to name a few. Recent short works include: The Museum Collaboration Manifesto, A:shiwi on A:shiwi, Buyer Beware, What I Tell Boys, and Please Don’t Call Me a Warrior. In 2013 he received the Guardian of Culture and Lifeways Award from the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums, and in 2010 during the American Anthropological Association’s annual conference Jim was awarded the first Ames Prize for Innovative Museum Anthropology.