Truth-telling, ancestral acknowledgement and community activism paving paths to decolonial futures.

Bynoe shares on her experience at the recently convened Commonwealth Association of Museums (CAM) 2024 Triennial Conference whose theme ‘The View From Here: Sustainability, Community and Knowledge Systems,’ welcomed delegates from the four corners of the globe. Hosted in Auckland, Aotearoa, from March 3rd to 8th, under the radical hospitality and care of the Auckland War Memorial Museum and the Waikato Museum, these observations summarise important questions raised during the gathering around the possibility of decolonisation, aspects of collaboration, guardianship and community engagement.

The full report can be found on CAM’s website with a link out a the bottom of this excerpt.

Kia ora, iwi, mahi, marae, moana, waka, mana, tupuna, pōwhiri, taonga, maunga, and aroha were few of the reverberating Māori words that filtered through our collective bodies, minds, hearts and spirits during the most recent gathering of the Commonwealth Association of Museums (CAM) 2024 Triennial Conference. Under the theme, ‘The View From Here: Sustainability, Community and Knowledge Systems,’ the conference welcomed delegates from the four corners of the globe in beautiful Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, from March 3rd to 8th, under the radical hospitality and care of the Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum (AWMM) and Te Whare Taonga o Waikato Waikato Museum.

As museum conferences go, this gathering proved provocative, intimate, challenging, inspiring and transformative. Participants and hosts comprising elders, Indigenous knowledge keepers, stewards, museum professionals, academics, artists, curators, activists, liberation advocates, spiritual guides, scientists, outliers and change agents were taken through the protocols of welcome, establishing respectful boundaries and Indigenous lineages grounded in Māori consciousness and worldviews.

On the grounds of the University of Auckland, the welcome ceremony and ritual started with a torrential downpour, with the heavens giving libation and blessing to the Earth and kindred from all times and generations. This omen satisfied the grounding and reverence that the tupuna/tipuna (ancestors) continued to demand and reaffirmed during the 6-day convening. Participants huddled under trees seeking shelter while waiting for the pōwhiri—a traditional ceremony—to begin in the wharenui or communal/meeting house. A wharenui/marae is the central heartbeat and gathering space for Māori encounters, teaching, ritual and exchange; they are spaces that host community celebrations, funerals, weddings and important events for the iwi (tribes) and is a place to memorialise the ancestors. It is a place where Māori identities, values, cosmologies and philosophy are reaffirmed; it is a place of belonging.

At the Waipapa Marae, we processed, drenched, women first, then men, in an order acknowledging the deep traditions of defence, the importance of encounter, kinship and rights of passage brought forward and kept in practice by the Māori. What could have been easily overlooked as patriarchal order superseding was given space for interpretation by the lead elder, who carefully explained the role of gender in the ritual. A marae is a place where challenges are met respectfully, and issues are debated and held in balance by Rongo, the God of peace. As shoes were unbuckled, umbrellas opened to dry, and feet scampered across the wooden porch to find shelter and warmth in the dimly lit belly of the wharenui. Greeted by the sheer awe and an architectural wonder with high ceilings and wide embracing ribs, spines and columns, and carvings of Māori deities and craftsmanship continued to awe in the many taonga—artefacts, traditional buildings, carvings, waka/canoes, objects and artwork—we encountered physically and virtually across presentations. Following an exchange of song, call and response, evocative and heartfelt opening welcomes and critiques were made by Māori elders and CAM Board Members Annelize Kotze (South Africa) and Nichodimas Cooper (Botswana), whose sharing called upon the spirit of the ancestors to gift each participant with the ability to hold each other voices and perspectives with kindness, love and respect. Keynote speakers Chanel Clarke and Dr Melani Anae established the tone for the spiritual positionality of matriarchal power, liberatory techniques and ancestral interrogation, which remained central in the coming days. 

Not to be taken as a gathering which forefronted buzzwords that have been captured and co-opted by museums and their EDI—Equality, Diversity and Inclusion—aspirations, the work of decolonisation continued to be foregrounded as a challenge with Clarke highlighting the need for institutions and its living human material engaging in ongoing reflexive work to move institutions out of talking and into the action or in her words, out of the noun and into the verb, out of intent and into reality. During her presentation, she lamented the urgency of ‘checking oneself’ while holding to actionable, transparent, and accountable values. Her down-to-earthiness as Tāmaki Paenga Hira’s (AWMM) first Māori curator chronicled the enduring legacies and traumas of colonisation on the spirit of Māori people while giving space for aspects of truth-telling which can lead to remediation with the institution and the psycho-spiritual impacts of those giving of their intellectual and embodied knowledge to museums. She questioned the status of institutional ‘postcoloniality’ while advocating for museums to think about embracing new knowledge and being mindful of actions that re-trauma staff and communities along with institutional gaslighting. Echoing these realities in philosophical ways, activist Dr Melani Anae called up the philosophy of the vā, a secular and sacred relational space that informs a code of ethics. Anae highlighted the urgency of tapping into Ancestral Intelligence as the most profitable AI to have a relationship with. Her presentation unlocked several scaffolds to recall humanity’s original GPS to value cultural identity and collective stories, asking a very important question: Can we have a relationship with the museum like the one we have with our grandmothers?

Upon closing the sacred meeting in the marae, visitors were traditionally greeted with the hongi (Māori greeting). As noses touched, mixed in with handshakes, fist bumps and hugs, we left the marae and gathered at Fale Pasifika to break bread. A fale—the heartbeat of villages— the second largest in the world- is the spiritual home of the University’s Pacific community. The model of Fale Pasifika takes inspiration from a Samoan fale and has a grounding energetic resonance recalling the boat’s hull. It is held in place by numerous gifts from the diverse pluri-Pacific regions. The cohort was welcomed by a totemic installation, ‘Beacons’ (2004), made by the late artist Jim Vivieaere (1947-2011), topped by seven frigate birds, both male and female, another signifier of our islands, navigation, migration, master boat builders and craftspeople who were transiting the Pacific and beyond in ancient times. The frigate becomes a symbol for the mobile agency of living entities. During this time, we could ground into convivial and relaxed sharing, connecting to new and old friends and colleagues, and diving deeper into our stories as ways to be seen.  

Many thanks to Rachel Erikson, CAM Executive Director and the wider Board of Directors for supporting this report.