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1/I wrote this piece for @Hyperallergic as a way to think about my own vexed relationship with museums, places I know to offer joy, solace and reconnection but that are also sites of pain, and deep injustice and inequality. https://twitter.com/Sanchita_writes/status/1349372825111506944
2/To be a brown museum worker is to worry about how I am knowingly and unknowingly complicit in practices invested in colonial, imperial and white supremacist histories and ongoing presents. Every action, even (especially) the small and mundane one, needs re-thinking, re-doing.
3/To be a temporary steward of archaeological items especially is to be aware that many of these items are funerary, placed in their loved ones’ resting places to ensure a safe passage to the next life.
4/Being with these peoples’ things is a constant reminder of the cruelty and perversity of the desecration of their graves in a colonial pursuit of “knowledge.”
5/My loved ones’ stories are in colonial-era archives and museums. One grandfather’s story lies in a museum in Chennai, India. The other grandfather’s material traces rest in an archive in London. My family asked me when I found these items, “Why do they have it when we should?”
6/The same colonial apparatus that took away these things developed the approaches to cataloguing, conservation, archival housing, digitization that made it possible for me to find my family again, 90 years later.
7/How to make sense of this embeddedness of harm and recovery, disconnection and reunion?
8/As both a museum worker and family member, I wish that such collections had never been made, that our world had not been so thoroughly torn apart by these histories and presents of violence, removal, oppression and erasure. I wish people and their (our) things were always home.
9/Working in a museum is a daily reminder that this is not the case, that my privilege and responsibility to temporarily care for someone’s things means that someone else cannot do so.
10/It underpins that mundane and necessary searching for paperwork, for records, to re-connect items and people and places, all with the hope that some may go home to loved ones. It underpins the mundane making and keeping of records.
11/I am a conservator, I believe in the value and potential of repair. And when repair isn’t possible, or culturally inappropriate for me to perform, I believe in the possibility of care, to care long enough that the person who needs to find these items will someday find them.
12/My grandfathers’ things were cared for in two different places, oceans apart, by many people I will never know. I have met the current carers, the latest in this 90 year long line of museum and archive staff, people who were just doing their work.
13/Perhaps they hope, as I do, that our work makes possible reconnection, repair, and return.
