Reversing the gaze: considering Indigenous perspectives on museums, cultural representation and the equivocal digital remnant

Partnerships between museums and Indigenous communities have a complex and fraught history. At the centre of these relationships are often questions around agency and intent, and an increasing expectation of privileging the Indigenous voice. Effective partnerships can provide a lens for the literal and figurative repositioning of the Indigenous voice in the museum space, and this lens is refocused to determine the capacity of these spaces to provide a platform for Indigenous representation.

This chapter poses questions around museum and collections process and tools that support Indigenous agency as we move from object-focused display to social history-imbued stories in museum representation. It also asks some broader questions around the ownership of both the physical remnants of our cultures, and the potentially shifting and amorphous ownership issues around the digital, relocated and repositioned voice of our peoples in the national museum space.