Many museums in the so-called ‘West’ were established during the height of European colonial expansion. They served as colonial sites of collecting and glorifying the achievements of empires by displaying Indigenous cultural objects and human remains that were acquired without consent and with violence.
With few exceptions, critical histories of empire have been marginalised in favour of celebratory narratives, art-historical perspectives, or de-historicised ethnographic descriptions.
Despite several policy initiatives in the Netherlands, the decolonisation of Dutch museums is far from complete. ‘Decolonisation’ has often become a metaphor in educational and social justice discourse, where the term ‘decolonisation’ becomes associated with improving schools, critical methodologies, and decentering White, settler-colonial and/or Eurocentric perspectives. Such politically correct discourse feeds into appearing decolonial/decolonised without actually advancing social justice for Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC) communities.
Photo Alissa van der Scheer
Decolonisation is about material, spiritual, and relational restitution and reciprocity. Not about (ex)colonisers excusing implicitly in imperial-colonialism and moving into present-day innocence.
Some objects from colonial collections in Dutch museums have been returned to their countries of origin, most notably Indonesia. Yet we are still far removed from a complete repatriation of Indigenous objects, relations, and life.
The process of returning objects remains complex and slow for a few reasons:
- One reason is that the return of objects is tied to diplomatic relations and legal agreements.
- Second, museums are not always the owners of an object. At times, an object is on loan from the government or a private collector.
- Third, the provenance of an object is unclear when colonial records may be incomplete, biased, or missing … therefore needing years of research to understand how an object was acquired and whether coercion, violence, or unequal exchange was involved before requests to return objects are possible.
- Fourth, even when applications for object restitution have been made, it is not always guaranteed that the objects return to source communities.
What is needed, then, is an anti-Eurocentric and anti-colonial epistemology. In this light, the condition for decolonial participatory methodologies becomes the inclusion of BIPOC onto-epistemologies and methodologies, not just including source community members as mentioned contributors to provenance research into colonial collections. It is what Walter Mignolo calls ‘epistemic disobedience’ and Aníbal Quijano ‘epistemological decolonisation’.
