TEXTOS: Digital Repatriation: Virtual Museum Partnerships with Indigenous Peoples

Digital Repatriation: Virtual Museum Partnerships with Indigenous Peoples

Paul Resta, The University of Texas at Austin Loriene Roy, The University of Texas at Austin Marty Kreipe de Montaño, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian Mark Christal, The University of Texas at Austin  

The University of Texas and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian have had experience working together on virtual museum projects that bring indigenous people to the museum for the purpose of “digitally repatriating” important cultural items. The initial virtual museum project provided a strategy for cultural responsive teaching in American Indian schools. They also provided a forum for cultural revitalization and cultural collaboration. The university and the museum are currently developing proposals to further develop the digital repatriation concept to include more tribal community participation international indigenous participation.  


 The richness of indigenous cultures is widely recognized and of great interest to Native and non-Native people alike.  Many cultural and historical artifacts of indigenous life are spread across the collections of museums and private holdings. Such holdings may be viewed on site or, increasing, electronically through virtual museums. Still, many indigenous people have limited access to their own cultural heritage and may be excluded also from interpreting these objects even when publicly displayed.   Around the world indigenous people have been struggling to reclaim their cultural rights and maintain their languages.  In the United States, one legal tool, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA), has been used by American Indian tribes to reclaim important cultural artifacts from museums.

The law provides for the return of human remains, funerary objects, sacred items, and “objects of cultural patrimony” to the tribes of their origin.  Initially, the law alarmed many museum professionals who were afraid their Native American collections would be gutted, but this has not occurred.  Since NAGRA became law, outside of a few controversial instances, museums have become very cooperative with Native communities in the repatriation process.  In many cases, items that fall under this law have not been repatriated because the tribes do not have facilities to care for them.  Most American Indian museum items do not fall under this law, and remain inaccessible to Native Americans who live far from the museums that own them. In 2000, two partners in the Four Directions project, the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian and the University of Texas at Austin, began a unique collaboration that created partnerships with the museum and American Indian schools for the purpose of creating virtual museums of American Indian cultures. 

The experience has led us to explore a middle ground of cultural reclamation for indigenous peoples that we call “digital repatriation.” The Four Directions project was a major education initiative funded by a U.S. Department of Education Challenge Grant (see http://www.4directions.org) .  The partners in the project, which included four universities and two museums with important American Indian collections, worked with nineteen American Indian K-12 schools to develop technology- supported approaches to culturally responsive teaching.  The initial virtual museum project brought teams of students, teachers, and tribal community members from three Four Directions schools to New York City to create a Virtual Tour of the National Museum of the American Indian.  The result of this effort is the virtual tour at http://www.conexus.si.edu/VRTour/. Since that initial effort the Four Directions participants at the University of Texas and the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian have worked on nine other virtual museum projects that included ten American Indian schools, six regional museums, two tribal museums, a university anthropology department, and a Canadian provincial archeological service. These experiences are providing an evolving concept for museum- school-community collaboration that serves the missions and needs of all participants—what we are calling the Four Directions model for virtual museum collaborations.

Three aspects of our experiences with virtual museum projects guide the Four Directions model:
• Cultural Responsive Teaching – Virtual museum projects are culturally responsive, because they teach to and through the culture of the child and bring community concerns and values to the center of the teaching-learning process.  Students are motivated to excel because they are doing important, authentic work to recover and preserve their heritage.  They gain from the knowledge of museum professionals and the wisdom of community elders.  They develop skills in research, writing, social studies, science, mathematics, information literacy, and twenty-first century information technology.
• Cultural Revitalization – A common concern among Native American peoples is the recovery and preservation of cultures and languages.  Much of what remains of traditional material cultures resides in museum collections far from Native American communities. Virtual museum projects provide a way for communities to digitally repatriate precious items of cultural heritage.  In the Four Directions Model,  virtual museum activities also take place in the Native American communities, where students research and record local materials that supplement the museum’s resources for the virtual museum.  Local resources such as oral histories, cherished heirlooms, traditional stories, dances, and songs, native language and contemporary arts get combined with museum materials to present the vision of a vital, living culture.
• Cultural Collaboration – Museums exist to preserve heritage and educate the public, but Native Americans sometimes object to the way museum exhibitions appropriate cultural property.  Native Americans want the public to have access to authentic knowledge of their histories and cultures, but they believe that some aspects of their cultures should not be shared with outsiders.  Virtual museum collaborations provide a venue where thorny issues of cultural property rights may be addressed and protocols for cultural collaboration may be designed and levels of accessibility decided.   Since our Four Directions experiences, the University of Texas and the National Museum of the American Indian have been seeking ways to expand this model of digital repatriation so that it will apply to more tribal institutions, such as tribal colleges, tribal museums, and tribal culture centers. 

We have submitted grant proposals to the Institute of Museums and Library Services and the National Science Foundation that expand on our initial experiences with the Four Directions model and seek international partnerships. The purpose of our poster session is to demonstrate some of the virtual museum projects we have developed, share our progress in creating new virtual museum partnerships with indigenous peoples, and make contact with conference-goers who are interested in similar collaborations.