Conversations around museum decolonisation are critically reflecting upon how UK museums can effectively address colonial histories and their subsequent impacts on collections and display. However, such discourse has not yet been applied to the digital platform Google Arts and Culture GAC with regard to transnational collaborative projects between museums and Indigenous peoples living in the Americas. I suggest here that there remains a significant taboo in the UK whereby the voice of the coloniser threatens to suppress that of source communities when curating digital international projects.
This paper, a condensation of my MLitt thesis, aims to question whether GAC can be a digital venue for decolonisation and meaningful collaboration between colonially imbued encyclopaedic museums and Indigenous communities in the Americas. This stems from both the museum and Google. Museums have an inability to confront Eurocentric outlooks and legacies of coloniality, and Google is a Western, capitalist megacorporation; both have the potential to restrict collaborative agency and impede decolonial endeavours.
There remain some taboos for UK museums with colonial imbrications to acknowledge and confront inherent colonialities, which increases the potential to disempower by inhibiting discussions around colonialism and its legacies.
I contemplate how applications of decolonial methodologies can allow UK museums to continue the restitution process of decolonisation by encouraging meaningful relationships with source communities based on ethical co-curation and respect. Museum collaborators must decentre their institutional authority and facilitate capacity for communities to curate their own narratives, without dominating or defining the methodological exhibition-making process. I would suggest that it is ironic to produce a digital exhibition, which presents Indigenous culture as an empowering tool of self-determination, while presenting interpretation from a Western perspective or methodology.
This includes the need to adhere to conditions set by Google Arts and Culture, which restrict certain curatorial freedoms and collaborative potential. The Cos-Maya-politan Future , however, is an interesting case study of Maya heritage from an Indigenous scholar who embraced values of collaboration and sensitivity into their process.
