Anthropology, Archaeology and Museums are complicit in racism and white supremacy.

Going off-topic today to share what I’ve been working on at my day job! It’s tangential to what I usually talk about here, so I figured y’all might enjoy it.

I’m a librarian in the Washington DC area, and for years, my library has been working on a project to preserve our collection of VHS tapes. This week, we finished digitizing the last videotape on-site for a total of 2250 videos that we can make available to our patrons again.

We have a collection of over 8000 VHS tapes, including lots of documentaries and educational films. For obvious reasons, our patrons can’t access them anymore. VHS is undergoing what has been called “degralescence” – degradation and obsolescence. The tapes are deteriorating, and the format is becoming more obsolete. Fewer new TVs even have the video inputs for VHS players.

For the most part, these tapes aren’t unique. They’re commercial videotapes, which means compared to one-of-a-kind video collections, they’re a low priority to digitize. But if we don’t do it, who will? If not now, when? So we did it.

Under Section 108© of US copyright law, libraries are allowed to make a reproduction of a copyrighted work, as long as 1) there are no new replacements for sale and 2) the original format is degrading, damaged, or obsolete. There’s more to it than that, but basically, as far as VHS is concerned, if it’s not being sold anymore, we can digitize it!

With lots of help from our student staff, we audited the collection and found that we had about 4000 videos that qualified. A huge chunk of those were being kept in off-site storage. The remaining 2200+ were on-site, and that’s what we finished digitizing this week.

It took a lot of time. VHS digitization happens in real-time, so an hour-long tape takes one hour to capture.

In total, that comes out to 37 TB of video, compressed! Here’s our storage arrays:

This is a big achievement for us, and it hasn’t been an automatic process. Preservation takes work. There’s a lot of human labor involved, especially in A/V preservation, with manual processing and attention needed for individual videos. We listened to experts and found how to make it work in our time and budget.

The project is still ongoing. In addition to everything we have to digitize from off-site storage, we have to keep maintaining the digital video collection. Digital storage is volatile, and we have to ensure we have backups and that we keep it in an accessible format. Preservation is never in the past tense. A thing is never preserved. We’re always preserving.

This has been a huge team effort across the library. These projects don’t happen alone, and I want to stress how much the whole library contributed to this!

absolutely incredible you funky little archivists

Went to the Aboriginal artifact exhibit in Chicago. And it’s interesting. How many blankets and masks and totem poles say ‘unknown source’, because every five seconds my mom would stop and point to something and say. “Pauline’s grandmother made that,” or, “That belongs to Mike’s family, I should call him” because. It’s all stolen

“These artifacts were excavated by archaeologists from a burial site in the 1970’s. The remains were returned for reinterment” Okay cool, cool cool. So you just, like. Dug up the grave of a respected family member, stripped them naked, mailed their body back to their family and kept everything they were lovingly put to rest in. Like a graverobbing bastard

Reminds me of the time when of the elders from my hometown started touching a totem pole in the Museum of Anthropology out at UBC and got yelled at by the staff, only to tell him that the pole had been stolen off of the front of her bighouse when she was ten years old.

Museum collectors did the equivalent of kidnapping a family member when they were away fishing.

In my art history class we’re discussing museums and repatriation and I am so fucking angry

Just wait until I have some free time, I’ll post my favorite whiny bitch responses from European museums.

First, a fun fact: “It is noted in the report that some 90% of African cultural heritage currently exists outside of the continent and is displayed in major Western museums.” So keep that in mind when reading these.

Let’s get this party started, shall we?

“Unlike Nazi-looted art, what was taken in the former colonies are not recognized as criminally obtained under international law.”

Then there’s the Parthenon Marbles, and if you don’t know, it’s a whole big Thing with a near comical backstory. But this post is long enough as is, and I don’t want to bore you. In short: Britain has bunch of the carvings and statues that were left in the Greek Parthenon, and Greece wants them back. Here are some choice bits from the British Museum’s current official stance on the marbles:

By the way, this document that is less than 1,000 words mentions that the public can view the them “free of charge” no less than 3 times.

Fun times.

Sources: (x) (x) (x) (x)

I actually was given a C minus in this class in my undergrad for calling out museums for being whiney about repatriation. My professor HATED me and we would get into heated arguments about how stolen artifacts needed to be returned. God those were the days….lol FYI this professor Dr.Wilson got mad one day and told me to go back to Mexico and asked me if I was legal. I know this anger…lol 

Greece’s Acropolis museum is literally a huge fuck you to the British Museum. The New Acropolis Museum opened in 2007. It looks amazing

Since you can’t dig anywhere in Greece (especially right by the Acropolis) without hitting ruins or artifacts, they built a glass floor so that visitors can see the ruins below the building.

A huge part of the design for the new building was to emphasize that Greece is ready and capable of caring for the Elgin Marbles (a huge defense the British Museum will give is that colonized countries don’t have the resources to care for the artifacts properly). So they went out of their way to make this as clear as possible.

The top floor of the building is entirely devoted to the metopes and friezes around the Parthenon. Like, so devoted that they even oriented the top floor to align with the actual Parthenon

So if you walk around the floor, everything is oriented as if you were walking around the actual Parthenon.

So the two ends of the floor are dedicated to the two pediments. And they were very particular with how they’re displayed.

Wow there sure are a lot of things missing.

They left space for where the Elgin Marbles should be. All of the pieces are labelled. For all of the missing pieces, there is a sign saying that that piece is in the British Museum. It’s pretty hard to miss when entire sections are not there.

That entire floor is just to show that they all belong together. The pediments need to be back together. Get your shit together British Museum

You missed my favorite part of the museum:

They have separate room devoted to these statues, with a spotlight shining on the empty spot where the sixth one is supposed to be. It was the saltiest museum I have ever been to, and I was living. My favorite part was when the tour guide pleaded to us to write to the British Museum and ask them to return the artifacts, and an older man from India muttered under his breath, “Ha! Good luck with that.”

That aside, it’s also one of the most beautiful museums I have ever been in. The architecture is stunning. If you ever get a chance, absolutely go to it.

For those who don’t know the story behind why all these Greek statues are in Britain, buckle up for a wild ride.

The Parthenon has a storied history, obviously, as it is was an incredible temple in a major Mediterranean port. It had started to show wear and tear over the years, and different people had attempted at various points to “save” it, or at least save the carvings. Most of the time, these attempts did more harm than good.

Then along comes Thomas Bruce, a Scottish nobleman more commonly know as Lord Elgin. Between 1799-1803 he acts as British ambassador to the Ottoman empire, which controlled the entire region that is now Greece. He gets really interested in the old works of the classical civilizations and asks the Sultan of the Ottoman empire if he can undertake an extensive study and recording of the art at the Acropolis in Athens. Not only does the Sultan say yes, his agreement states that Elgin can “take away any pieces of stone with old inscriptions or figures thereon.” It is agreed by all parties who are not the British Museum that the Sultan was referring only to the various pieces that were scattered across the ground, but not anything still standing.

Elgin interpreted this wording to mean, “Take anything you want. Go absolutely hog wild.” So he did. He sawed many of the marble carvings off the building to make them easier to transport, which did damage to both the carvings and structure of the building itself. Here’s my favorite part: one of the ships he was using to transport the marbles sank. When Elgin found out, he sent a letter to local authorities asking them to retrieve the cargo, which he referred to as “stones of no interest to anyone but myself.”

He took literal metric tons of artwork, which he wanted to use to decorate his home back in Britain. Except he poured so much money into this project that he went into debt and had to sell the marbles. Parliament bought them (which was not a popular decision at the time) and put them in a public museum. Then in 1832 Greece won its independence from the Ottoman Empire, and the marbles have been a point of contention in Greek-British relations ever since.

Here’s another quote from the British Museum displaying an astonishing degree of ethnocentrism!

The most recent volley in this fight was Britain saying, “well, we can’t give you the marbles, your museum is too dinky to display them in their full splendor.” In response, Greece built the above museum.

As many people mentioned in the comments, Black Panther was fantastic in that it brought the issue of museums and repatriation into the public view. Now with more voices joining in, hopefully change can happen more quickly.

You left out the part where the document giving Elgin permission to take them may or may not be a forgery, also!

This was a part of this I was not familiar with! And wow! I looked into it, and there is decent evidence that the agreement from the Sultan was faked! This story just keeps getting better and better!

All art seized by colonialists should be returned to the people and cultures they belong to.

Museums are NOT more important than people.

Good morning,

museums should repatriate artifacts belonging to living cultures and display reproductions instead

Good afternoon,

no one is entitled to the sacred art, tools, or costumes of another culture (save members of the culture itself) and nonsacred reproductions will serve just as well for the purposes of education and appreciation

Good evening,

having museums full of reproductions would be even cooler than having museums full of sacred artifacts because when modern craftspeople are able to replicate those artifacts, it’s usually because they still make the same items the same way today

this means that you could have description tags emphasizing that such-and-such item has been made by these people in almost the same way for hundreds of years

having museums full of beautiful reproductions takes the emphasis off of Things and places it on the People who make them, which is really as it should be

Back to school tip: a sick day self care box for students ☁️

A box of everything you will need to take good care of yourself on sick days. Especially useful for students living alone/away from home.

Make one at the end of summer for autumn/winter sick days and freshers flu. 

Ideas for your box:

(You could also change the contents to make it more of a mental health day kit)

Masterpost of Free Gothic Literature & Theory

Classics Vathek by William Beckford Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë The Woman in White  & The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu The Turn of the Screw by Henry James The Monk by Matthew Lewis The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin The Vampyre; a Tale by John Polidori Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson Dracula by Bram Stoker The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Short Stories and Poems An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce Songs of Innocence & Songs of Experience by William Blake The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Pre-Gothic Beowulf The Divine Comedy  by Dante Alighieri A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe Paradise Lost by John Milton Macbeth by William Shakespeare Oedipus, King of Thebes by Sophocles The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster

Gothic-Adjacent Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen The Wendigo by Algernon Blackwood Jane Eyre & Villette by Charlotte Brontë Lyrical Ballads, With a Few Other Poems by Coleridge and Wordsworth The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens The Idiot & Demons (The Possessed) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas Moby-Dick by Herman Melville The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells

Historical Theory and Background The French Revolution of 1789 by John S. C. Abbott Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth by A. C. Bradley The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance by Edith Birkhead On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History by Thomas Carlyle Demonology and Devil-Lore by Moncure Daniel Conway Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism by Inman and Newton On Liberty by John Stuart Mill The Social Contract & Discourses by Jean-Jacques Rousseau Feminism in Greek Literature from Homer to Aristotle by Frederick Wright

Academic Theory Introduction: Replicating Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Science and Culture by Will Abberley Viewpoint: Transatlantic Scholarship on Victorian Literature and Culture by Isobel Armstrong Theories of Space and the Nineteenth-Century Novel by Isobel Armstrong The Higher Spaces of the Late Nineteenth-Century Novel by Mark Blacklock The Shipwrecked salvation, metaphor of penance in the Catalan gothic by Marta Nuet Blanch Marching towards Destruction: the Crowd in Urban Gothic by Christophe Chambost Women, Power and Conflict: The Gothic heroine and “Chocolate-box Gothic” by Avril Horner Psychos’ Haunting Memories: A(n) (Un)common Literary Heritage by Maria Antónia Lima ‘Thrilled with Chilly Horror’: A Formulaic Pattern in Gothic Fiction by Aguirre Manuel The terms “Gothic” and “Neogothic” in the context of Literary History by O. V. Razumovskaja  The Female Vampires and the Uncanny Childhood by Gabriele Scalessa Curating Gothic Nightmares by Heather Tilley Elizabeth Bowen, Modernism, and the Spectre of Anglo-Ireland by James F. Wurtz Hesitation, Projection and Desire: The Fictionalizing ‘as if…’ in Dostoevskii’s Early Works by Sarah J. Young Intermediality and polymorphism of narratives in the Gothic tradition by Ihina Zoia

So I’m looking through this Barbie comic book and there’s a random educational segment on art restoration?????

Two job-hunting resources that changed my life:

This cover letter post on askamanger.com. A job interview guide written by Alison Green, who runs askamanager.

useful

Alison Green’s advice works. 

Alison Green got me all my interviews from 2012 onward, I am reasonably sure.

Alison Green is basically my life guide.

Mine too - she was my most visited website for the first few years of my working career, and I cannot emphasise enough how much her advice helped me navigate how to behave in a work environment. You name it, she has an answer for it. Definitely a life hack.

The issue with conversations about stolen indigenous artifacts in museums is that outsiders don’t understand that these usually aren’t just chunks of wood or stone or whatever. They’re our spirits, ancestors, deities, guardians, valued and loved members of our community. They deserve the same care and respect that any other member of our communities deserve.

Sara Jacobsen, 19, grew up eating family dinners beneath a stunning Native American robe.            

Not that she gave it much thought. Until, that is, her senior year of high school, when she saw a picture of a strikingly similar robe in an art history class.

The teacher told the class about how the robe was used in spiritual ceremonies, Sara Jacobsen said. “I started to wonder why we have it in our house when we’re not Native American.”

She said she asked her dad a few questions about this robe. Her dad, Bruce Jacobsen, called that an understatement.

“I felt like I was on the wrong side of a protest rally, with terms like ‘cultural appropriation’ and ‘sacred ceremonial robes’ and ‘completely inappropriate,’ and terms like that,” he said.

“I got defensive at first, of course,” he said. “I was like, ‘C’mon, Sara! This is more of the political stuff you all say these days.’”

But Sara didn’t back down. “I feel like in our country there are so many things that white people have taken that are not theirs, and I didn’t want to continue that pattern in our family,” she said.

The robe had been a centerpiece in the Jacobsen home. Bruce Jacobsen bought it from a gallery in Pioneer Square in 1986, when he first moved to Seattle. He had wanted to find a piece of Native art to express his appreciation of the region.

       The Chilkat robe that hung over the Jacobsen dining room table for years.   Credit Courtesy of the Jacobsens      

“I just thought it was so beautiful, and it was like nothing I had seen before,” Jacobsen said.

The robe was a Chilkat robe, or blanket, as it’s also known. They are woven by the Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian peoples of Alaska and British Columbia and are traditionally made from mountain goat wool. The tribal or clan origin of this particular 6-foot-long piece was unclear, but it dated back to around 1900 and was beautifully preserved down to its long fringe.

“It’s a completely symmetric pattern of geometric shapes, and also shapes that come from the culture,” like birds, Jacobsen said. “And then it’s just perfectly made — you can see no seams in it at all.”

Jacobsen hung the robe on his dining room wall.

After more needling from Sara, Jacobsen decided to investigate her claims. He emailed experts at the Burke Museum, which has a huge collection of Native American art and artifacts.

“I got this eloquent email back that said, ‘We’re not gonna tell you what to go do,’ but then they confirmed what Sara said: It was an important ceremonial piece, that it was usually owned by an entire clan, that it would be passed down generation to generation, and that it had a ton of cultural significance to them.“  

Jacobsen says he was a bit disappointed to learn that his daughter was right about his beloved Chilkat robe. But he and his wife Gretchen now no longer thought of the robe as theirs. Bruce Jacobsen asked the curators at the Burke Museum for suggestions of institutions that would do the Chilkat robe justice. They told him about the Sealaska Heritage Institute in Juneau.

When Jacobsen emailed, SHI Executive Director Rosita Worl couldn’t believe the offer. “I was stunned. I was shocked. I was in awe. And I was so grateful to the Jacobsen family.”

Worl said the robe has a huge monetary value. But that’s not why it’s precious to local tribes.

“It’s what we call ‘atoow’: a sacred clan object,” she said. “Our beliefs are that it is imbued with the spirit of not only the craft itself, but also of our ancestors. We use [Chilkat robes] in our ceremonies when we are paying respect to our elders. And also it unites us as a people.”

Since the Jacobsens returned the robe to the institute, Worl said, master weavers have been examining it and marveling at the handiwork. Chilkat robes can take a year to make – and hardly anyone still weaves them.

“Our master artist, Delores Churchill, said it was absolutely a spectacular robe. The circles were absolutely perfect. So it does have that importance to us that it could also be used by our younger weavers to study the art form itself.”

Worl said private collectors hardly ever return anything to her organization. The federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act requires museums and other institutions that receive federal funding to repatriate significant cultural relics to Native tribes. But no such law exists for private collectors.

       Bruce and Gretchen Jacobsen hold the Chilkat robe they donated to the Sealaska Heritage Institute as Joe Zuboff, Deisheetaan, sings and drums and Brian Katzeek (behind robe) dances during the robe’s homecoming ceremony Saturday, August 26, 2017.   Credit NOBU KOCH / SEALASKA HERITAGE INSTITUTE      

Worl says the institute is lobbying Congress to improve the chances of getting more artifacts repatriated. “We are working on a better tax credit system that would benefit collectors so that they could be compensated,” she said.

Worl hopes stories like this will encourage people to look differently at the Native art and artifacts they possess.

The Sealaska Heritage Institute welcomed home the Chilkat robe in a two-hour ceremony over the weekend. Bruce and Gretchen Jacobsen traveled to Juneau to celebrate the robe’s homecoming.

Really glad that this is treated as hard hitting news, no really, I am

This is why spaces like Tumblr are so vital in changing the narrative. We cannot back down from the truth.

I am a big fan of your tags:

#kanaka maoli#cultural property#theres no international law that says indigenous cultural property#must be repatriated#so i imagine shits gonna get even more real#over the next couple decades#yet another way in which#colonialism eventually bites everyone but the ultrarich#in the ass 

[BTW, can someone let me know if the tags above mess with your screenreaders? I don’t have access to one right now and want to make sure these posts are accessible.]

With any luck the online protests will lead to the timely repatriation of that cloak. I can see a lot of people dragging their feet until it leaves the public consciousness.

Hey, thanks. I was a museum worker most of my adult life and I got very used the idea that I/my concerns were a pain in the ass and a nuisance, so - this is nice to hear.

It still really feels to me like a lot of folks in the museum/gallery/auction/art industry either don’t fully get how actually painful it is to indigenous people see their cultural property and sacred objects on the chopping block, or they just don’t care.

I wrote about this on some post that’s going around that depicts the Antiques Roadshow meme and has a Navajo First Phase “Chief’s Blanket” Robe on it, but - I will absolutely never forget working in a (very famous) art museum as a junior curator years ago when this older White dude I’d befriended from the graphics department asked me to come and take a look at something he’d inherited from an uncle that he thought might be Native. And I totally expected him to show me some weirdass celluloid Skookum doll or something totally cheesy, and was instead confronted with a circa 1860 Navajo robe in pristine condition. I sat and talked to him for about an hour about the meaning of the robe and how the Dineh concept of hoozho is woven into it. He asked me what it was “worth” and I told him (you could easily buy a house with cash from the sale of one of these robes). And he thought about that for a moment and then said to me, “But if it’s a sacred object, I should return it.”

I try to keep that in my heart when I see articles like the above because - here was a guy who had no relationship to Native America whatsoever, and yet that was his first impulse: doesn’t matter how much it could materially enrich me, if it’s sacred to the people who made it, it needs to go home.

Locking your wheelchair lift and requiring disabled people to find an employee to unlock AND OPERATE it is a direct violation of the ADA.

“The [ADA] Standards require ‘unassisted’ entry and exit from lifts (§410.1). Situations in which platform lifts are locked and require users to request or retrieve a key for operation will not satisfy this requirement for independent operation.”

“Attendant operation, although recognized by the ASME A18.1 Standard, is expressly prohibited by the ADA Standards. Platform lifts must provide ‘unassisted entry and exit from the lift’ (§410.1).”

(Source)

Smells like a lawsuit waiting to happen…

This is not great, but it’s likely because people are fucking stupid and will screw around with it if it’s not locked up.

[ID: @gavrielabrahams “It’s probably because people were peeing in it.”]

You think people were peeing. In an open wheelchair lift. In the middle of a museum. With public toilets around the corner.

I think not.

But even if people had been peeing in it or otherwise misusing the lift… It. Doesn’t. Matter. It’s not just “not great.” It’s ILLEGAL. It is just as illegal to lock off a wheelchair lift as it is to not provide one to begin with. 

The correct response to people peeing in an elevator is never to lock the elevator. It is to provide a toilet. If you think the correct response to any problem is to violate the civil rights of an entire group of people by denying them access, YOU ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM.

Disability rights are civil rights.

You want to know exactly how this went down? Let me tell you a tale.

I was visiting the museum with friends. They went on around the corner while I finished looking at the previous exhibit. I then followed them around the corner only to find I couldn’t get up to the exhibit because the museum AS PART OF THEIR POLICY had illegally locked the lift. My friends didn’t know the lift was locked (why would the lift be locked?) and had no idea that I couldn’t get to them.

Now I, the disabled person, am forced to travel halfway around the building to the front desk to find someone to unlock the lift for me, wait for them to finish what they’re doing, and then travel all the way back to the lift. This was bad enough in a wheelchair. Who else uses lifts? Oh yes. People who struggle to walk. Can you imagine, as a person who struggles to walk, being forced to walk halfway around a building, and then back again, just to access an exhibit? You wouldn’t do it. You’d skip the exhibit. You’ve just been completely denied access.

So finally the museum employee unlocks the lift and then operates it (because yes, they’ve made it so I can’t operate it myself, which is also illegal). I finally get to the top probably ten minutes later, only to find that my friends have finished looking at the exhibit and are heading down again, wondering what has happened to me. 

After I’ve gone to all the trouble to get up there, fuck it if I’m not going to look at the damn exhibit. So I look at it, then head back to the lift to go back down, only to find they’ve locked the lift with me at the top and gone back to the front desk.

If one of my friends hadn’t stayed up there with me, I’d probably still be up there. As it was, my friend had to go down the stairs, back around to the front, find an employee, and get them to come back and let me down. Leaving me sitting up there. Alone. For another five minutes.

Now imagine if I had gone to the the museum by myself. Or what if there had been an emergency? You think if there was a fire some museum employee who couldn’t be assed to leave the damn lift unlocked until I had come back down would really have run back into the building to unlock the lift so I could get down? I think not.

Locking an accessibility feature is never the right solution. It is denying access to an entire class of people. Which is ILLEGAL and a CIVIL RIGHTS VIOLATION.

Disability law is civil rights law.

Exactly.

Also, anything designed with the assumption that a disabled person will always have a companion is a violation.

Unassisted access means just that.

WHAT MUSEUM? fucking shame on management this is absolutely unacceptable. I endorse a good public shaming on Twitter in cases like this.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.