Amanda Foote

Museums in Canada are beholden to an increasing slate of recommendations from Indigenous communities from reports by the Canadian Museum Association and the Assembly of First Nations to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. Yet, the most significant changes to museum Indigenous relationships over the past thirty years have been largely relegated to representation in exhibitions. This research investigated why museums struggled to implement more structural changes and found that Indigenous engagement is largely taken up as an individual responsibility rather than an organizational imperative. This conclusion was arrived at through a process of implementing Indigenous visiting practices inside museum spaces, which is a unique contribution to methodology. Lastly, the research uncovered complexities in “authenticity” of museum objects through historic collecting practices, inaccurate provenance data, and colonial logics of taxonomies. The research shows how these challenges to authenticity continue to serve the museum and provide evidence of the hardships of ongoing colonialism for Indigenous people. The team involved in the research is preparing a set of recommendations for museums working with Indigenous people and several publications.