On Wednesday and Friday, February 17 and 19, the University of Michigan Museum Studies Program hosts an online series of two panels on colonial archives and decolonial museology. The purpose is to inquire into the University of Michigan’s archives, museums, visual and living collections to ask how they are implicated in the violent histories of settler colonialism in the United States and US colonialist rule over the Philippines. How can we carry these difficult archives and collections into the future? How do they intersect and in what ways do they differ? What are our responsibilities as researchers, curators, and archivists in relation to the collections, their histories, and their indigenous and national communities of origin?
The first panel, “Indigenous Epistemologies: Restorative Justice in Settler-Colonial Collections,” will be held at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, February 17.
The second panel, “Colonial Archives and Decolonial Museology: The National Museum of the Philippines and Philippine Collections at the University of Michigan,” will be held at noon on Friday, February 19.
The panels are free and open to the public.
Read more and register here.
Cover image: Ojibwe men making birch canoes
Joel E. Whitney & Charles A. Zimmerman
Stereoview, published by Lovejoy & Foster, ca. 1870
William L. Clements Library, Richard Pohrt Jr. Collection of Native American Photography
