Maasai Community Consultations | Living Cultures project Pitt Rivers Museum
Channel: InsightShare
Date: 2020-04-29

Find out more about InsightShare’s Living Cultures initiative and its Decolonising Cultural Spaces project here: https://insightshare.org/network/​

The video documents a unique community-wide consultation process carried out by Maasai video hub Oltoilo La Maa in 2019 that reached 70% of Maasai in Tanzania and Kenya. 

Background: A delegation of Maasai leaders visited Oxford in 2018 as guests of InsightShare and University of Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum to make an inventory of Maasai artefacts held in the museum collection for over 100 years. From over 100 objects they saw and touched, they identified 5 'sacred objects' of great cultural significance, which would never have been given away willingly and should not be treated as "dead things sitting in a mausoleum". The objects represent the living culture of the Maasai, they are more-than-symbols of inter-generational connection (father-son, mother- daughter, of clans and age-sets) and all are still in use today. 
A video to document the visit was screened across Maasailand and news of the visit was shared with elders, on local radio and at many community meetings. 

A delegation including the Maasai Laibon, Spiritual Leader, returned to Oxford in early 2020. Their visit was documented in 2020 feature documentary "Decolonising Cultural Spaces: the Living Cultures Project" : https://youtu.be/3midDMjvlLo

Since 2017, the Living Cultures project has been building an approach to enable collaborative working between Indigenous communities and the museums that hold objects from their cultures. Participatory Video is at the heart of this strategy. With the support of InsightShare, Indigenous Peoples have been using Participatory Video to consult their communities and elders, to share their voices and to improve representation. This means that decision making and strategy building is truly participatory and the project partners are accountable to the various Maasai communities.

InsightShare’s Living Cultures initiative is a growing movement across Asia, Africa and the Americas uniting indigenous communities across borders; to celebrate, foster and protect their cultures with the principle of self-determination at its very heart.  


InsightShare welcomes kind donations that will go directly to The Pan African Living Cultures Alliance (PALCA), an international NGO led by and for Indigenous Peoples of Africa and registered in Kenya. PALCA’s mission is to safeguard communities’ biocultural rights, support inter-generational transmission, preserve indigenous languages, promote traditional governance of natural resources, with participatory video at its heart. Donate today to support our work with indigenous communities to protect their lands, rights and cultures around the world. 100% of donations are spent on local projects. Donate here: https://insightshare.org/donate/ 

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