A Debt to Decay? Envisioning Decolonial Ethics and Indigenous Materialism in the Museum

Millions of materials preserved by arsenic, protected by plastic bags, stored in metal cabinets and dark drawers—what does it mean to decide how they live and if they are allowed to die? This paper interrogates ethical assumptions and explores imaginative possibilities of life and death in the anthropology museum. 

In light of calls for decolonization and pressure to rematriate/repatriate Indigenous belongings, ancestors, and other cultural materials, collections once considered beacons of success and prestige of the West have become the greatest ethical and administrative challenge for the very institutions which worked so hard to build them. Indigenous peoples from Native American Nations, pueblos origínarios, and beyond have fought for generations to make obvious the violence of extraction and to make the case for restitution. Though many establishments and scholars have resisted demands for return and sought legislative loopholes, the tide of popular opinion is decidedly shifting and institutions are expected to acknowledge their role in colonial histories and revise their practices accordingly. However, this is easier said than done, even with the best of intentions and collaborations the pathway for conventional rematriation can be unclear, contested, impossible, or undesirable. Here, I attend to materials which “fall through the cracks” and thus will remain, for the foreseeable future, in museum storage. What are the relational and ethical obligations to these Indigenous belongings?

Specifically, in this paper I think from and with a contested collection of thousands of Maya materials from the sacred site of Chichén Itzá, Yucatán, México which have been housed at Harvard’s Peabody Museum for over a century. These offerings (including gold, bones, incense, and precious stones) are not simply inert items but rather can be understood as powerful figures in relational networks both past and present. For Mesoamerican peoples, material bodies, like human and animal bodies, are imbued with vital energies or life forces. Therefore they are active and essential participants in cycles of life and death, fertility, regeneration, and in maintaining connections with the gods. Yet, in coming to the museum they are treated as inanimate objects which exist to be conserved, researched, and displayed alongside sacred materials from around the world. In these storage spaces we then find ourselves in entanglements of entities, assemblages of ancestors in exile. The Chichén Itzá collection is one of many cases which makes clear the existential crisis of conservation versus decay and therefore offers an opportunity for interrogating ontological assumptions and imagining alternative forms of relating in liminal spaces.