Haida visit to the Pitt Rivers Museum
18 Aug 09
More than a dozen members of the Haida First Nation, from Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte Islands) in British Columbia, Canada, will visit the Pitt Rivers Museum and British Museum next month to research nearly 700 Haida artefacts.
Research staff from the community and the museums hope to recover knowledge, memories and vocabulary relating to these historic artefacts. Haida knowledge about the artefacts, and their on-going significance within the community, will then be added to museum records. The Pitt Rivers Museum collections include a Haida totem pole and approximately 300 other Haida objects.
To enable this to happen, the Pitt Rivers Museum has been awarded a major grant of £104,748 by The Leverhulme Trust, which will support an international research network whose participants include The British Museum, Pitt Rivers Museum, the Haida Gwaii Museum, and members of the Haida Nation, a Canadian First Nation. Additional support for the project has been provided by the University’s John Fell Fund.
Visitors to the Museum will be able to get a taste of the vibrant cultural life of Haida Gwaii during The Haida Happening (in connection with Oxford Open Doors 2009 programme), on Sunday 13 September from 1–4 pm, as the guests dance, sing and give talks and demonstrations in the gallery.
Thousands of artefacts were collected from Haida people in the 19th and early 20th centuries, including totem poles, among the most iconic artefacts in museum collections. However, there is relatively little specialist knowledge about these collections in the UK, and Haida people have had little access to them.
Dr Laura PeersWe are looking forward to learning about these objects from Haida elders, artists, and curators.
The visiting Haida researchers include curators, clan leaders, artists and elders with great knowledge of their material history and its cultural meanings. They will gain hands-on access to important heritage items to support cultural knowledge and Haida identity. At the same time, museum staff will have the chance to learn from community members and to create lasting ways of sharing knowledge about these collections.
The project is unusual in its scale. The grant will fund travel for 11 Haida research delegates who will work with nearly 300 objects at the Pitt Rivers Museum and a larger collection at the British Museum. The Haida have also undertaken their own fund-raising efforts to bring even more researchers to the UK.
In addition to working with the collections, the project aims to develop new ways for museums and communities to work together to interpret historic collections and share this knowledge amongst the wider community. The project features new forums for discussion between Haida people, UK museum professionals, and museum audiences, and takes into account work done behind the scenes, in public exhibitions and programmes, and later on, on Haida territory.
Museum staff and visitors will benefit from this chance to experience directly what Haida collections mean to Haida people today. Dr Laura Peers, Curator for the Americas collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, said, ‘We are looking forward to learning about these objects from Haida elders, artists, and curators so that we can interpret materials to the public and also serve the needs of the Haida people. It will be a challenging but also exceptionally promising project.’
Other outcomes of the project will include a book charting the project findings and process, and a conference for UK museum professionals. A follow-up visit by Pitt Rivers and British Museum staff to Haida Gwaii will allow discussion of these issues more widely with members of the Haida Nation. A detailed archive of the project including photographs and records from both collections will be deposited at the Haida Gwaii Museum for community access.
Haida transformation mask depicting Raven as the Creator and the Wanderer. Carved by Charles Edenshaw c.1882-1980. 1891.49.8. © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.