Keywords

Indigenous Peoples in USA, ethnological material, Japanese museums

Objectives

With recent improvements in IT and transportation networks, the world’s “unexplored regions” have been shrinking dramatically. It has become possible for those who live in such regions to communicate directly with researchers, demand that ethnological museums provide information related to their ethnic group, and scrutinize and manage such information. Ethnological museums and researchers can no longer define their audience as exclusively those who visit museums, use materials provided by museums, or read museum research reports. The scope of museum users must be expanded to include the source communities that produced museum source materials. Finding ways to cooperate effectively with source communities has thus become an urgent issue. The objective of this research is to explore how to construct relationships between source communities and museums or other collecting institutions. Three central questions are explored: the relationship of researchers to the researched (in the case of Native Americans); management of intellectual property; and cooperation with researchers and collecting institutions. Several ethnological museums in Japan with collections of Native American materials will be used as case studies. The concept of cooperation for sharing museum materials with source communities will be explored by experts in sociology, museology, history, social psychology, and cultural anthropology, together with the institutions that maintain collections.

Research Results

During the three-and-a-half-year joint research project, we held a total of 12 workshops and 19 researchers gave presentations. We discussed theories and cases that target the whole nation of the United States based on reports by members of this joint research project. By linking it with Minpaku’s Info-Forum Museum Projects (Documenting and Sharing Information on Ethnological Materials: Working With Native American Tribes), which had been implemented concurrently, we were able to put this project into practice in the form of research into collection review of materials housed by Minpaku and other institutes as we will discuss later while referencing discussions in the joint research. As for direct research results, we are in the process of collecting manuscripts from eleven participating members of the joint research group and will compile them into the publication tentatively titled “Collaborative” Studies with Indigenous Peoples edited by Atsunori Ito. Through this book, we will attempt to draw a blueprint on what is practiced, including discussions and exhibitions in the framework of indigenous peoples and museums or indigenous peoples and academia, from the standpoint of research ethics or collaboration.
Besides these, we organized four international workshops associated with the research project. The first workshop was Re-Collection and Sharing Traditional Knowledge, Memories, Information, and Images: Problem and the Prospects on Creating Collaborative Catalog, which was organized on January 28th and 29th, 2014 at Minpaku. The results of this were published as Senri Ethnological Reports (SER) No. 137 in 2016 edited by Atsunori Ito. The second one was Collection Review: Methodology and Effective Utilization for the Museum and the Source Community organized for six days from October 5th through 10th, 2014 at Minpaku and the following research into collection review conducted through October 17th. The third one was Collection Review: The Process of Inviting Source Communities for Collection Review and Consideration of Anthropological Documentation held on April 16th and 17th, 2015 at Minpaku and the fourth one was the System Development for the Info-Forum Museum: Philosophy and Technique held on February 11th and 12th, 2016 at Minpaku. In other words, from the second fiscal year of the joint research, we were able to invite Native Americans in the US mainland to folklore museums in Japan, such as Minpaku and Little World, and collaborate with them in conducting collection reviews targeting materials housed by these museums.
The key to the collaboration here lies in whether or not the indigenous people’s community and the museum that houses materials on it can mutually determine what specific benefits they can get by taking that action. Because merits on the part of the museum side, such as high level informatization of materials and education of museum staff other than those in charge of material collection, and merits on the part of the source community side, such as realization of self-representation of its own culture and independent participation (in pointing out consideration toward cultural sensitivity), were understood and recognized as the whole new benefits for the both sides, this collaboration was realized. It was also revealed, however, that depending on the places to which researchers belong (e.g. whether they work for university or are museum staff) or the academic discipline or research method (ways of dealing with the target people or research resources vary according to academic disciplines, such as historical science, archaeology, anthropology, psychology or sociology), collaboration cannot necessarily be realized and that even if they are folklore museums that belong to the same category, the availability of curators at present and in the past also holds the key to making a collaborative project possible. On top of these, as reports from other ethnic groups or practical cases shed light on the fact that in order to make collaboration possible, political relations or budget other than academic interest is also heavily associated, it became clear that we need to give consideration to such aspects as well.