Indigenous curatorial engagements can recognise the historic faults, contentious presents and future possibilities of collections for Indigenous communities.
Reclaiming colonial-era collections can help Torres Strait Islander women and communities (re)connect to culture, place and histories, says Dr Leah Lui-Chivizhe from UNSW’s School of Humanities and Languages.
Dr Lui-Chivizhe is descended from Meriam and Erubam Le peoples of the eastern Torres Strait Islands. The Scientia Senior Lecturer is researching Meriam women’s knowledge and practices through the 19th century collection of anthropologist Alfred Cort Haddon.
“There is a meagreness of historical records detailing the lives of Torres Strait Islander women,” the historian and curator says. “Collectors were European men who overwhelmingly documented what they saw and took from the vantage point of the white male’s perceived superiority.”
Islander women and their activities were often presented as trifling in comparison to those of Islander men, she says. “Women are there – fishing, cooking, preparing food, getting their boys ready for initiation – they are everywhere, they had to be. But Haddon writes as if they’re a ghostly presence.
“Using museum collections [to resurface women’s knowledges, practices and histories] can cut a pathway through this loud textual silence.”
Together with global Indigenous artists, scholars and curators Noelle M.K.Y. Kahanu, Taloi Havini and Jordan Wilson, Dr Lui-Chivizhe curated the exhibition, Fault Lines: Imagining Indigenous futures for colonial collections, at Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA).
Fault Lines is funded by Ludwig Max University, Munich through the Indigeneity in the 21st Century project. The exhibition reflects on museums as sites of both historic fracture and future possibility through engagements with colonial-era collections.
It draws on historic and geological links between Cambridge, Bougainville (near Papua New Guinea), Hawaiʻi, the Salish Sea (at the Canadian and US border), and the Torres Strait. The curators considered the Pacific plate that connects their homelands as metaphor.
“It helped that we were staying in Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park [during the project’s development] which got us thinking about how volcanoes both disrupt and create,” Dr Lui-Chivizhe says. “Walking around the edge of Kīlauea and reflecting on how millions of years of volcanic activity has been building and shaping the Hawaiian archipelago was a foundational element of our process.”
The exhibition asks how we might channel or think with the generative energy of geological shifts to cultivate shared practices of care between museums and Indigenous communities globally.
“In recent years, museums have begun to address their extractivist histories. Colonial-era collections have attracted increased scrutiny, raising questions about custodianship, curatorial ethics and restitution,” she says.
“Indigenous-led engagements with collections recognise our knowledge, agency and resilience, and can facilitate stronger futures for Torres Strait Islander and other Indigenous communities.”
The curators engaged with collections from MAA, British Museum and Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford in various ways, through interventions with objects, artistic responses and research, Dr Lui-Chivizhe says. For her part, resurfacing women’s knowledges and practices was paramount.
Her practice triangulated the objects that Haddon collected (storying and mapping them to place); the archives (from the collections alongside other contemporary records); and the oral histories and knowledges of the Meriam communities (through consultation and engagement).
“One of the things that was important for me and in my work was that [Alfred] Haddon recorded stories, but he also named the people who gave him those stories and where the stories were given so we can locate stories to people and place.”
Haddon’s second trip to the Torres Strait in 1898/99 was a large Cambridge-funded expedition collecting from and documenting the life ways of Islanders. This amounted to six volumes of published research. Some of his observations record restricted information, making their publication controversial.
“There is this tension between what he recorded, it’s the most comprehensive ethnographic description of Torres Strait, [and whether] he should have shared those things about us in this way ... It still causes some disquiet among Islanders.”
Jude Philp (USYD), Aunty Elsa Day and Anita Herle (MAA) viewing Meriam women’s objects in the MAA. Photo: Leah Lui-Chivizhe.
However, these taken objects speak to a rich cultural history. Their materiality makes this undeniable, whereas “oral histories and stories can be critiqued by people who don't recognise their forms and significance”, she says.
She worked with the local community, particularly Aunty Elsa Day, a Komet elder from Mer. Aunty Elsa is a former primary school teacher who is studying a master of Indigenous languages education at the University of Sydney. Aunty Elsa contributed her knowledge and stories related to the material, organised key consultations on Mer, and aided with Meriam mir language matters.
Including a Meriam sign – “a noticeboard” – from Haddon’s collection in Fault Lines proved imperative. “It’s not very big. It looks like an old fence paling,” she says.
“When I first came across it in 2012 – it’s written in Meriam language – the only word I understood was a word for ‘woman’… but there was no translation on the registration card.”
In records from the expedition’s linguist Sidney Ray, she discovered it was confiscated from a place for women and girls: it said, “if any man were to infringe that area, to stray into that area, there'd be penalties”.
When she took the image and translation of the sign back to the island, “[the women] became quite animated”. It spoke to the presence and significance of women’s practices and knowledges on Mer that had been previously denied.
Dr Lui-Chivizhe also included fire and rain stones, used to keep the fires burning and for weather practices respectively. She was interested in their representation in what appears to be the pregnant female form. The significance of this begs further investigation, she says.
On seeing images of these figures, Mer Elder Alo Tapim, said: “It all starts in the womb,” explaining that while “Meriam society is male oriented, only women make new life possible”.
Finally, the exhibition includes a small box containing some red dirt. According to the collection record, pregnant women ate the soil for its mineral content.
“But the other notation that caught my eye … [states that] eating the soil would lighten the skin tone of the child. [Which begs the question,] how early are people thinking about colour? Where did these ideas around racial science come from … just a couple of years out from Federation?”
Undoubtedly, these kinds of engagements come with their own cost for Indigenous curators and researchers. “More and more people are acknowledging that the working in the space of the archives – reading archival records, but also working with objects – is trauma inducing,” she says.
“It’s vital to be working in trauma-informed ways to protect yourself, to be aware of your reactions, to look after your spirit and those connections with ancestors.
“As it stands, the exhibition invites visitors to reflect on confronting relationships with colonial histories, to contemplate emerging practices for Indigenous collections across the globe, and to consider how our engagement with colonial-era collections might enrich the futures of Indigenous communities.”
Ultimately, the exhibits are “teasers” – they exist without further context – that may perhaps lead to the development of an education program that unpacks why this is the case and what is its significance, she says.
Dr Lui-Chivizhe and Aunty Elsa have now presented on the research together in Cambridge and prior to this, lead a Sydney Torres Strait community engagement with Torres Strait collections at the Chau Chak Wing Museum, together with Dr Jude Philp, at the University of Sydney.
It’s vital to consider how projects contribute to communities, Dr Lui-Chivizhe says. “[Research impact] is about finding points along the way where capacities can be built, people can be brought on to engage in ways that are also useful or beneficial to them,” she says.
“For me, it always comes back to using what’s available through intellectual processes to strengthen cultural resilience and consolidate intergenerational knowledge.”
School of Humanities & Languages
Dr Leah Lui-Chivizhe
Pillar 9: Strengthen societal resilience, security and cohesion
