Carrying Our Ancestors Home
Carrying Our Ancestors Home, a project founded by UCLA’s American Indian Studies Center and the Fowler Museum under the directorship of Dr. Mishuana Goeman and Dr. Wendy Teeter, seeks to illuminate previously unengaged practices and infrastructure behind the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and how Native people regard various aspects of the law, and the work they do to enact and enforce it. To achieve this goal, they have collaborated with native cultural practitioners, tribal members, professionals, and academics in the Southern California area to create a digital educational resource webpage about the repatriation of ancestral remains and cultural items.
Jewish Museum in Prague
Established in 1906, the Jewish Museum in Prague is a museum documenting Jewish heritage in the Czech Republic. Its collection of Judaica is one of the largest in the world, and includes about 40,000 objects, 130,000 books, and an expansive archive of histories from the Czech Jewish community.
Object Repatriation and Knowledge Co-production for Indonesia's Cultural Artefacts
Written by Panggah Ardiyansyah, this blog post explores the benefits and limitations of knowledge production resulting from the repatriation of objects to Indonesia, drawing from case studies such as the defunct Museum Nusantara in Delft to the National Museum of Indonesia in Jakarta and the British Library's digitization of Yogyakarta manuscripts. Ardivansyah aims "to show that the repatriation process can be used as an opportunity to decentre the construction of knowledge inspired by or even embodied by the returned objects themselves," while underscoring the importance of physically transferring objects to and preserving ownership by Indonesian communities.
Protocols for Native American Archives
The Protocols for Native American Archives were created in April 2006 by a group of nineteen Native American and non-Native American archivists, librarians, museum curators, historians, and anthropologists gathered at Northern Arizona University Cline Library in Flagstaff, Arizona. The participants included representatives from fifteen Native American, First Nation, and Aboriginal communities. This website contains the best professional practices for culturally responsive care and use of American Indian archival material held by non-tribal libraries and archives as well as Native American communities.
Indigenous Engagement Branch at the State Library of NSW
The Indigenous Engagement Branch at the State Library of New South Wales works with Indigenous communities across NSW concerning the preservation and management of Indigenous documentary heritage resources, and collaborates proactively with Indigenous people and communities regarding access to the collection. The site also contains protocols and statements of best practice to provide guidance for the Library’s work in this priority area.
Culturally Safe Libraries: Working with Indigenous Collections
The National and State Libraries Australasia (NSLA) established the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Culturally Safe Libraries Program in 2018 to ensure that their libraries are culturally safe spaces in which staff working with Indigenous collections are well informed about content and access protocols, and about the history and cultural heritage of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples those collections relate to. NSLA libraries are committed to providing cultural competency and role specific training for all staff, which is based on protocols developed by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Library and Information Resource Network – known as the ATISILIRN Protocols.
Restitution and Institutional Change
The Restitution and Institutional Change project, led by Professor Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, seeks to analyze how British national museums have obtained, curated, and displayed non-Western objects and intellectual property, with a focus on their repatriation. The project also aims to expose "the systemic racism and intolerance of British national museums and developed strategies for exhibiting Empire, including scientific facts and their materialisation in art, the difference between Institutional critique and infrastructural activism, transparency, movement, performance and experimentation, and the mobilisation of shame and embarrassment about Empire."