Category Archives for Decolonising collections

NatSCA Digital Digest – December 2023

Compiled by Olivia Beavers, Assistant Curator of Vertebrate Zoology at World Museum, National Museums Liverpool.

Welcome to the December edition of NatSCA Digital Digest.

This is the last Digest of 2023 – packed full of festive activities and the latest on where to go, what to see and do in the natural history sector including jobs, exhibitions, conferences and training opportunities. If you have any top tips and recommendations for our next Digest please drop an email to blog@natsca.org.

Sector News

NatSCA Conference & AGM 2024 – SAVE THE DATE & CALL FOR PAPERS

The Annual Conference & AGM of the Natural Sciences Collections Association will be held on Thursday 18th and Friday 19th April 2024 in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. The first day will include the AGM, presentations, and lightning talks. The second day will include presentations in the morning, followed by gallery and collection tours in the afternoon.

Trials and Triumphs: sharing practice across the museum sector

The #NatSCA2024 conference invites proposals for presentations on a broad range of themes. We seek ideas from the natural history collections community, educators, collaborators, and beyond. We are interested in practical lessons, unique solutions, new collaborations, and to show what has and hasn’t worked with projects.  We are looking for presentations that touch on every aspect of museum operations, including audience engagement, collections management practices, changing laws, social justice, restitution and decolonisation, environmental issues, global challenges, research and academic engagement.

This practical conference aims to celebrate triumphs and amplify successes in museums, but also highlight the pitfalls and lessons learned from situations that didn’t go as planned. We will prioritise papers that focus on sharing ideas, tools, and guidance rather than simply reporting results. We want to make this conference practical and useful, so please try to reflect this in your abstract.

While we have a focus on natural science collections, we recognise that we can learn from others in the wider museum sector, and we welcome submissions from anyone who wishes to share techniques and ideas with broader relevance and application.

Papers can be presented in any of several formats: A 20-minute presentation (consisting of a 15-minute talk followed by 5 minutes of Q&A) or a 5-minute lightning talk. Talks (both lightning and longer) can be presented in person or by submission of a pre-recorded presentation, with the option of an in-person or live stream Q&A (via Zoom).

Deadline for submission: 5pm GMT Friday 19th January. Please email conference@natsca.org with any questions.

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How Do You Do Decolonial Research in Natural History Museums?

Written by Jack Ashby, Assistant Director of the University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge.

Subhadra Das and Miranda Lowe’s paper, Nature Read in Black and White: Decolonial Approaches to Natural History Collections (2018) acted as a wake-up call to our sector, effectively founding a discipline in natural history museums. In the five years since, a lot of work has begun to address the colonial legacies underpinning collections of animals, plants, fungi and rocks.[i] The principal aims of this work include telling more honest stories about the different kinds of injustice involved in the acquisition of collections; and addressing the fact that our museums have long been prioritising narratives elevating white individuals over everyone else. In doing so, it is hoped that a greater diversity of people will feel represented by our museums, thereby enhancing the relevance of the collections.

Natural history collections dwarf those of any other museum discipline, and unlike sectors which have been thinking about this for decades, the practices underpinning their creation have not traditionally prioritised recording associated cultural or social histories. Like others who felt inspired by Subhadra and Miranda’s call to action, faced with contemplating how to begin to unpick the stories hidden behind literally millions of ‘scientific’ specimens, it was fundamental to consider the question, where do you start with decolonial research in natural history museums? Obviously, there is no one answer, but I thought it could be helpful to list a few possible approaches. One underlying element is to recognise how colonialism and its framings have shaped the way that events took place – from major historical moments to minute individual acts – and how the stories about these events have been told.

Below is a list of possible starting points for research, with examples of what that could look like in practice (in reality most of these overlap). For me, each has something to say about the entwined human and environmental costs of the colonial project – questions that natural history museums are uniquely placed to address.

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How to Find Ectoparasites on Study Skins and Explore Natural Heritage Shared between Colonial and Provincial Museums

Written by John-James Wilson, Lead Curator of Zoology at World Museum, National Museums Liverpool & Jing Jing Khoo, Postdoctoral Research Associate at Institute of Infection, Veterinary & Ecological Sciences, University of Liverpool.

Selangor Museum was established in Kuala Lumpur by British colonial officials in 1887. A purpose-built museum building, opened in 1907, was designed by Liverpool-born architect Arthur Hubback, but there is a stronger link between Selangor Museum and Liverpool.

Selangor Museum’s early director Herbert Robinson was also born in Liverpool and had worked as an assistant at the Liverpool Museums, now known as World Museum. Selangor Museum wasn’t a large institution, with just three British curators and three museum hunters from Sarawak, one being Charles Ulok. But through the museum’s work, a European knowledge system was imposed onto the local wildlife.

The museum’s work included extensive hunting on the hill and mountains and islands of Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia. The museum soon ran out of storage space in Kuala Lumpur and specimens were routinely sent to England. Hundreds of specimens were sent to Robinson’s former workplace, World Museum, in 1914.

https://archive.org/embed/from-selangor-museum-to-liverpool

Click link above for 3-minute video about Selangor Museum and its connection to Liverpool made for the Green Representatives Network at Monash University in Selangor.

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William Thomas March, a Jamaican Collector, Naturalist and Early Pioneer of Biological Data Recording in Jamaica.

Written by Olivia Beavers, Assistant Curator of Vertebrate Zoology at World Museum, National Museums Liverpool.

Figure 1. William Thomas March’s bird skins stored in the Vertebrate Zoology collection at World Museum, National Museums Liverpool © National Museums Liverpool (World Museum: NML-VZ T1134, NML-VZ T760, NML-VZ T5652, NML-VZ 1989.66.1279, NML-VZ T19525, NML-VZ T12817, NML-VZ T9981, NML-VZ T1128, NML-VZ T14037, NML-VZ T14031/ Olivia Beavers)

August celebrates Jamaican independence, so what better way to celebrate than to talk about a Jamaican collector from the 1800s whose contributions to understanding Jamaican biodiversity are not yet fully recognised. 

I recently finished the project stage of the Associateship of the Museum Association (AMA). My project focused on helping to tell untold stories of the collections held at World Museum. 

Through trial and error, I started to look through World Museum’s database and Google the names of collectors to see if we had collectors who had black or brown heritage – with a focus on collectors with specimens from the Caribbean. I ended up finding William Thomas March. Only two previous papers were written about him, both by Catherine Levy (Managing Director of Windsor Research Centre, former President of the Caribbean Birds, and of BirdLife Jamaica). 

To coincide with the research and my project, I created a new dataset titled ‘Bird skins from Jamaica in the collections of World Museums Liverpool’ – now available on the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) website. It includes specimens from William Thomas March.

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People and Plants Workshop Three: Sharing Knowledge in the Amazon

March 10th, 2023, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

Written by Fiona Roberts (Collaborative ESRC PhD student, Cardiff University & Amgueddfa Cymru-National Museum Wales) and Violet Nicholls (Assistant Curator in Herbarium, Portsmouth Museums).

This post is dedicated to Dr Dagoberto Lima Azevedo (1979-2023), Tukano researcher, translator, scholar, author and a voice for the Indigenous peoples of the Rio Negro in the northwestern Amazon.

The third and final workshop of a one-year project ran in March 2023, at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. The project, “People and Plants: reactivating ethnobotanical collections as material archives of indigenous ecological knowledge”, began in January 2022, and was supported by NatSCA (Natural Sciences Collections Association). Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), it was led by National Museums Scotland, the Powell-Cotton Museum and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. 

The workshop ran in partnership with Museu Goeldi, Brazil and the Department of Cultures and Languages, Birkbeck, University of London. It addressed the question, ‘how ethnobotanical collections in museums can best be used to support Indigenous communities?’. Dr Dagoberto Lima Azevedo, from the Federação das Organizações Indígenas do Rio Negro, and Claudia Leonor López Garcés (Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi) travelled from the Brazilian Amazon for the event. They met with fellow panellists Professor Mark Nesbitt (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew), Professor Luciana Martins (Birkbeck, University of London), Cinthya Lana (University of Gothenburg) and Dr William Milliken (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew).

Fig. 1. Some members of the panel at the workshop with, from left to right, Cynthia Sothers, Luciana Martins, Dagoberto Lima Azevedo, Cinthya Lana, Claudia Leonor López Garcés and Mark Nesbitt. Photo by Gayathri Anand.

The Richard Spruce collection (1849-1864) was used as a case study. Spruce collected plants and recorded their uses in South America, and is considered to be an early ethnographer, as he also recorded the traditions and customs of the different communities that he met on his travels.1 He collected over 14,000 herbarium specimens in the Andes and Amazon regions, and 350 items are in his ethnobotanical collections.2

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