AIC 53rd Annual Meeting

This paper will explore the outcomes and lessons learned throughout a four-year IMLS grant-funded collaborative conservation project at the Avenir Conservation Center of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. During the project, entitled Northwest Coast Collection: Building Bridges and Detailed Conservation Survey, we welcomed over 20 Indigenous representatives from five North American Tribes and First Nations to engage with their cultural heritage and participate in shared decision-making about conservation and care of over 700 collection items. We found some common trends that spanned the groups across many topics, including how sensitive materials should be stored, tolerance of a significant amount of wear on objects that were made for use, and an acceptance of freezing items for pest prevention. There are also many examples of feedback unique to individual groups, such as one group’s interest in identifying original pigments and another group's strong desire to keep old museum labels adhered on objects. The project included two visits with a total of 14 Musgamakw Dzawada’enuxw First Nation (Kwakwaka’wakw) community members from Gwa’yi (Kingcome Inlet, British Columbia); many of the visitors have direct familial ties to items in the DMNS collection, including parents and grandparents who made belongings in the collection. These visits demonstrated the power of expanding the participants beyond individuals who are accustomed to doing this type of work with museums. By including more representatives in the conversations, we were able to promote access to family treasures and facilitate discussions about future care for the items with the people who have the authority to make those decisions. The work with the representatives from Kingcome provided a different model for collaboration, as it became apparent that decision-making needed to be made at the family level for belongings that could be associated with a maker or owner. An important finding from the grant also included the importance of external collaboration between the museum and communities, as well as internal collaboration between museum departments to establish mechanisms for feedback from participants. In this project, the Museum’s Community Research and Collaboration department collected feedback from representatives during an evaluation session near the end of each visit. These sessions were an opportunity for visitors to candidly share what was successful during the visit, what could be improved, and what their hopes were for the future of the collaboration. The project has helped clarify what we can do as museum professionals to build trust and be better collaborators.