Sunday 26 June 2022

Link round up

 This weekend Aotearoa marked the first Matariki public holiday - the first public holiday in the world to honour indigenous knowledge. In the lead-up, E-Tangata re-published a 2012 essay by Tā Hirini Moko Mead, Understanding Mātauranga Māori:

Mātauranga Māori is thus linked to Māori identity and forms part of the unique features which make up that identity. Because this is so, it also means that mātauranga Māori is a unique part of the identity of all New Zealand citizens. 

Some citizens may deny it, some may not realise it is there, some may reject it. But a good many will embrace it and be proud to be part of the revival process.

The Empire, Slavery & Scotland’s Museums Project, sponsored by the Scottish Government and coordinated by Museums Galleries Scotland, was commissioned to "recommend how Scotland’s involvement in empire, colonialism, and historic slavery can be addressed using museum collections and spaces."  

The recommendations have now been delivered to the Scottish Government. A brief outline here; the full report here:

The conditions of the last few years have created an unprecedented global and national focus on systemic racism: a need to collectively name it, and to try to understand what it means for all of us in practice, and how it continues to shape and define our world order. Scotland can become a country that reckons with its history with responsibility and maturity, working toward a more fair and equal society. Through the implementation of these recommendations, museums can be part of that change.

Aaron Straup Cope's latest post sometimes expectations happen to you is, as always an opus, both dense and freewheeling, and has at its core a recounting of the story of the Cooper Hewitt Museum's "Pen". I link to it partly because it introduced me to a phrase I've not heard before but which is so powerful, from historian Margaret MacMillan, author of The Uses and Abuses of History (which I have just ordered because obviously I should have read this):

The past keeps changing, because we keep asking questions of it.

"I'll be quite honest ... it was the misogyny". The Guardian pulls quotes about the political environment she had to cope with from a podcast with  Liz Ann MacGregor, reflecting on her two decades leading the MCA Sydney.

A tweet thread from Alice Te Punga Somerville about not being lazy with your academic citations

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