This Is Our Life: Haida Material Heritage and Changing Museum Practice by Cara Krmpotich, Laura Peers (review)

WRITING IN COLLABORATION with the Haida Repatriation Committee and staff of the Pitt Rivers Museum and the British Museum, Cara Krmpotich and Laura Peers meticulously chronicle the preparations, execution, and impact of bringing twenty-one Haida delegates into an encounter with two U.K. museums (the British Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum), the staff working in these institutions, and the Haida heritage objects and ancestral remains held within these collections. Krmpotich and Peers critique Clifford’s (1997) concept of the museum as “contact zone” by offering an extension of the notion to include preparations for, and later reminiscences of, the moments of encounter within both museums. The “contact zone,” they argue, actually begins with preparations, and continues long after the museum trip has ended, thus enabling encounters to make conflicts mutable: museum practices may change, creating new opportunities for relationships between Indigenous communities and the institutions holding their treasures.

This Is Our Life is an innovative experiment in coauthorship, which distinguishes the text from other scholarly analyses of Indigenous collections or encounters within museums. The book is framed chronologically, discussing first the idea for the visit, preparations, the visit itself, reflections on the encounter, and future hopes; however, the text is also nonlinear, with textual interludes and multiple writers offering different perspectives on events that occurred. These diverse voices illustrate distinctive, yet evolving, relationships to the materials seen and engaged with before, during, and after the Haida delegation visit. One of the strengths of This Is Our Life is the agency granted to the reader, who must navigate and negotiate various viewpoints and tensions that emerged throughout the project. While Krmpotich and Peers provide an overall narrative and analysis in between the interludes, they also allow the statements provided from Haida delegates and museum staff to speak for themselves. For example, the tensions that Krmpotich and Peers highlight in their structuring of the third chapter, “Moments of Encounter,” are genuinely brought to life through the voices of project participants.

Tensions and ambivalences permeate the text and become a focal point in the museum trip. While it is clear that the authors view the project as successful on many fronts, they are refreshingly honest about their oversights and mistakes, and more important, what may be learned from these missteps and why certain tensions should be respected. (Mis)communications, approaches to information recording, object handling, catalogue database management, and of course the very presence of treasured materials and ancestral remains in museum collections so far from Haida Gwaii were all sources of tension throughout the project. Recalling a statement provided by Haida delegate Vince Collison, Krmpotich and Peers acknowledge, “Museums were active participants in the historic events that stripped so many indigenous communities of their treasures. No matter how ‘successful’ we, collectively, may deem this project to be, these tensions still remain” (154). Success is not defined by dissolving tensions, but by allowing these tensions to emerge and transform the various parties and agendas involved. And this, the authors argue, is part of their criticism of Clifford’s “contact zone”—conflict is present and tensions permeate, but they are not necessarily intractable.

As a multiauthored ethnography and case study, This Is Our Life will be of particular educational value to museum professionals, aspiring students, and the field of anthropology more generally. Conservators, curators, and administrators are included as coauthors and acknowledged as affecting, and being affected by, the encounters that emerged when preparing for, hosting, and later reflecting on and maintaining relationships with the Haida delegation, and the Nation more broadly. As the focus of daily sessions, Haida heritage objects stimulated discussion, storytelling, song, and emotion, and these moments reminded museum staff of objects’ sentience as they were enlivened by embodied, sensory engagement. However, museum staff also felt committed to professional identities and ethics that mediated their relationships to the objects. Conservators and curators discussed these ambivalences and how the project reframed deeply...