title: Narrating the Museum: Contestations, Reclamations, and Refusals in Contemporary Indigenous Literature and Film
Creators: name: Saggar, Shelley Angelie
Publisher: name: University of Kent
Year: 2024

description: This thesis examines contemporary Native North American and Māori textual representations of the colonial museum in order to assess how literary methods might contribute to decolonial heritage futures within and beyond the museum itself. Whilst Indigenous and (post)colonial literary scholarship has hitherto examined how the metaphor of the museum is deployed in specific texts, this is the first sustained analysis of how Native North American and Māori writers and filmmakers narratively engage with the museum as symbol, setting, and a site in which to imagine and practice cultural sovereignty. I term such narratives "collecting texts" and this thesis examines the evolution of their central themes and wider influence during a period of increasing public scrutiny regarding colonial collections from 1990 to the early 2020s.

Taking the museum as a transnational analytic, this thesis surveys the ways in which Indigenous writers and filmmakers contest, reclaim, and refuse the colonial museum across their respective literary and filmic works. Bringing texts from Aotearoa New Zealand and North America into critical conversation, this study recognises the historic and continuing conditions of ethnographic theft, curatorial (mis)representations, and custodial debates that resonate across global Indigenous and (post)colonial contexts. This comparative frame attends to the specificities of Native North American and Māori literary and museal representations, tracing how tribal peoples across these contexts have respectively been incorporated into and - at times - excluded from local, national, and transnational heritage narratives. In adopting this approach, I analyse how contemporary writers and filmmakers imagine expansive alliances that exceed colonial modes of categorisation whilst grounding their works in tribally specific political contexts and literary forms. Indigenous texts, I contend, are uniquely placed to both narrativize museal critique and to operate as testing grounds in which alternative and enduring heritage histories and futures can be both historically evidenced and modelled as a developing practice.

In grounding this project in Indigenous literary studies and critical heritage scholarship, I advance an interdisciplinary methodology that bridges the gap between interpretive textual methods and contemporary museum practice. This is the central contribution of this thesis, to examine the potential of textual representation and analysis in order to address both the epistemic and material demands of decolonial work within and beyond colonial heritage institutions. Retaining a political and intellectual commitment to crafting anticolonial scholarly coalitions, I advocate for a close reading practice that is curatorial in nature - careful in its interpretation and assembly of material, whilst remaining theoretically ambitious in scope. Analysing how Indigenous representations of the museum activate the restoration of both Indigenous land and life that decolonisation demands, I build an argument for conceiving of the museum as a singular space in which the repatriation of Indigenous land and life might concurrently be galvanised - a practice which involves both the material returns and metaphoric shifts that, I argue, the colonial museum is uniquely placed to address.