What Happens to Indigenous Law in the Museum?

Abstract

In this article, I argue that recontextualizing Indigenous cultural heritage through institutional acquisition and cataloging can also be understood as a jurisdictional strategy that upholds the supremacy of US and Canadian legal regimes over Indigenous laws. To do this, I share what I have learned from participating in a Nation-led, community-based research project with the Nuxalk First Nation Ancestral Governance Office, in what is currently British Columbia, Canada. Our work together focused on reinvigorating the Nation’s laws, teachings, and protocols through the evolution of their own database of Nuxalk objects, still held in museum collections worldwide. I discuss this project and how it illustrates the legal context inherent to understanding much Nuxalk material culture. Next, bringing together literature on organizing knowledge in museums, settler colonial theories of dispossession, and archival copyright law, I look at how accessioning Indigenous objects into settler collections in the US and Canada is enacting another legal process, “written on top of” the legal meanings objects hold for the Nuxalk Nation, and reframing them as objects the museum has legitimate control and possession over. I close by reflecting on the strategies Nuxalk people, and other Indigenous artists and scholars, are undertaking to challenge the normative power of museum authority through interventions that are grounded in Indigenous governance and sovereignty.