FLIPPING THE NARRATIVE: Historical Collections as Sites of Cultural Diplomacy
Dr. Jilda Andrews, Yuwaalaraay cultural practitioner and museum ethnographer based in Canberra, will deliver the inaugural W. Wanambi Distinguished Lecture.
The world’s museums feature extensive collections of cultural material made by Indigenous Australians. Museums today face a kind of public reckoning that questions the historical making of these collections and what it means to maintain them. Underlying these questions is often the presumption that institutions operated and continue to operate without Indigenous agency, power or control.
This lecture explores a different presumption by considering that museum collections contain forms of cultural diplomacy enacted by Indigenous people themselves – as expressive of their desire to extend and deepen knowledges of culture and experience across cultural worlds. If we recognize this as a legitimate form of agency, we can re-frame the world’s museums, from sites of ongoing colonization and dispossession to sites of cultural strength with the potential to shape and inform stronger, intercultural futures.
Jilda Andrews is a Yuwaalaraay cultural practitioner and museum ethnographer based in Canberra, Australia. She draws from her heritage to recognize the cultural ecologies surrounding objects in museum collections. Her focus on material culture and their cultural worlds continue to push the definition of custodianship, from one that focuses on the preservation of objects, to one that is active in maintaining connections between cultural material and the dynamic systems that produce them. Jilda is a research fellow with the National Museum of Australia and the Australian National University, based in the Research School of Humanities and the Arts, and proudly serves as Co-Chair of the Advisory Council of the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection at the University of Virginia.