A shared understanding of success is critical for best practice in repatriation. However, there is currently little dialogue, or harmony, between museums, agencies, and Indigenous communities about what constitutes success or how it should be measured. While Indigenous approaches frame success in terms of positive impact on healing and wellbeing, museum, government and funding agency measures (KPIs) can be attached to numbers of returns/reburials within a certain timeframe. Too often this leads to processes driven by inappropriate criteria that consequently struggle to deliver on the opportunity for social benefit that repatriation represents (Pickering 2003).
While removal of Ancestors caused long-term injury, repatriation can combine factors integral to healing and wellbeing in a powerful and unique manner (eg. nation building, cultural governance, identity, self-determination, spirituality, cultural resilience, knowledge transmission, relationship-building (Hemming et al forthcoming; Kinnane and Sullivan 2016). However, these are rarely highlighted as priorities for undertaking repatriation, leading to a critical need for greater understanding about their inter-relationships and to urgently translate findings into policy and practice. This includes best-practice in the repatriation archive (rarely articulated in policy) which underlies processes central to healing and wellbeing in repatriation.
Organising returns and reburials which optimise wellbeing takes time, particularly when communities have received numerous Ancestors from multiple institutions with varying provenance levels. These complexities, and more, are experienced by Ngarrindjeri. Our Keeping Place is full of many hundreds of Old People awaiting reburial. More are in the National Museum of Australia (NMA), over 1000 are in the South Australian Museum (SAM), still more are overseas. This is a pressing, distressing, and complex situation. The challenge and necessity of holding mass reburials of our Ancestors in a manner that enhances Ngarrindjeri wellbeing, and to ensure the successful return of many hundreds more from domestic and overseas institutions underpins and drives the need for this project.
The project will articulate, action, and measure Ngarrindjeri understandings of success to guide process. Ngarrindjeri Yannarumi assessment practices provide a powerful methodology to do so. Yannarumi guides Ngarrindjeri decision-making based on how and whether a course of action impacts positively on the wellbeing of people and country. Combined with Collaborative Participatory Action Research (CPAR), Yannarumi will be used to greater understand the relationship between repatriation/reburial and wellbeing, guide the upcoming repatriation/reburial program, and translate research.
The project will also co-design and trial a protocol with the NMA to translate findings into Ngarrindjeri/NMA repatriation engagement. This will, in turn, inform development of key principles in a model for local adaptation by other museums and Indigenous nations, and into recommendations for repatriation policy and practice nationally and internationally. Participation by SAM assists discussions for development of Ngarrindjeri/SAM protocols.
The project will:
- Support the Ngarrindjeri repatriation/reburial program
- Explore the connection between repatriation/reburial and wellbeing
- Develop Ngarrindjeri measures for assessing repatriation/reburial success
- Investigate the role of archive management in repatriation/reburial best practice
- Design protocol for Ngarrindjeri/NMA repatriation that prioritises wellbeing
- Develop model for local adaptation by other First Nations, institutions and agencies
- Develop recommendations for policy and practice nationally and internationally.