Protected: Passing Down Indigenous Knowledge

Meet The Curators

Ashley is a third year Electrical Engineering & Computer Science major and Art History minor at UC Berkeley. This upcoming summer, Ashley will be working at Disney animation as a software developer. As an avid video game enthusiast in her younger years, Ashley wanted to focus on engaging some form of interactive technology component for youth to engage with in this exhibit.

Neha is a fourth year Art History Major at UC Berkeley with a focus on decolonization and repatriation in the Asian hemisphere. After graduation, Neha hopes to pursue a JD with a focus in art property and acquisition. Because of her interest in the intersection of art, public health, and law, Neha’s main interest in the exhibit was on the historical policies that shaped current social climates.

Amanda is a fourth year English major and Medieval Studies minor at UC Berkeley. After graduating in Spring 2022, she hopes to pursue a PhD in English with a focus on the Middle Ages. In the Summer of 2021, Amanda had the privilege of working at the Bay Area Discovery Museum. Since working at BADM, Amanda has taken a keen interest in making museum spaces accessible to young children.

Salvaged: The Hearst Museum, Colonialism, and Caring for the Past

This is the landing page for a digital exhibition curated by the students of UC Berkeley’s Spring 2021 History of Art 192CU: Social Justice and Museum Studies. In the pursuit of exploring Cal’s proximity to global colonialism through the lens of the Hearst Museum, we have researched a range of subjects, from the impact of colonialism on the landscape of the Philippines to contemporary artists who push back on salvage anthropology.

Content Warning: Some of the subjects included in this space are graphic and difficult to read, especially concerning the history of colonialism in California and the Philippines.

The Brutish Museums: Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence, and Cultural Restitution

Our classwork centered on unpacking the ways in which the museum has been a participant in global colonialism and exploring more recent, alternative models. We learned moving forward requires intention, energy, and dedication to reshaping institutions, maybe decolonizing or reindiginizing them. Mindful of how objects taken under duress continue to inflict harm in the present, we reimagined a museum that curates, exhibits, and collects with care. Crucially, we see a better and more mindful museum working with the descendants of marginalized communities, moving forward by returning objects, ancestors, and knowledge, so that communities can tell their own stories on their own terms of the past, present and future.

Care & Resistance: A Case Study on the Philippine Revolution from Spanish to American Colonization

Care and Resistance was created by Keziah Aurin, Shannon Roughan, Isabel Shiao as part of History of Art 192CU: Social Justice and Museum Studies during Spring 2021. The exhibit is a survey of artifacts collected by Roy Franklin Barton in the years following the United States’ acquisition of the Philippines. Care and Resistance uses these artifacts to highlight the Philippine resistance to colonization.

P vs. F, O vs. X

This exhibit refers to the inhabitants of the Philippines as “Pilipinos,” as opposed to the more familiar terms in the West and the diaspora, “Filipinos,” “Filipinx,” or “Pilipinx.” It is with great intention that we refer to people residing in the mainland, whose national language does not use the letters F or X and consider “Pilipino” as gender-neutral and all-inclusive.

The Treaty of Paris, 1898, and the Philippine-American War

In 1898, the Treaty of Paris settled the war between Spain and the United States. As a result of this treaty, Spain ceded Puerto Rico and Guam and sold the Philippines for $20,000,000. The expansion of US territory beyond its coasts was a realization of the period doctrine of Manifest Destiny and, perhaps, the origins of the US as a global superpower. The American government, media, and academia formulated the narrative of America as modernizing and westernizing savior, a myth that is ultimately false and harmful to Pilipinos. It erases the atrocities the US committed in the Philippines and its other colonies.

Diversity in the Philippines

During the Spanish and later the American era of colonization thousands of tribes were nationalized as Pilipinos. While it has existed for centuries, it is crucial to recognize that the Philippines is not a monolith. Instead, we must keep in mind the diversity within its 7,107 islands—diversity of geography, cultures, languages, physical appearances, and lived experiences. The collective mainstream understanding and teachings of Pilipino history were not, and are not, representative of the diversity of histories, especially of Indigenous Peoples’ history, present in the nation now known as the Republic of the Philippines.

Roy Franklin Barton

Roy Franklin Barton (1883-1947) was a school teacher whose work became the basis of Pilipino anthropology. He conducted extensive research on Indigenous Peoples in the Philippines. He was known for his study on the Ifugao and Kalinga people of the Cordillera and Mountain Provinces region, located north of Luzon. Most, if not all, of the objects found in this exhibit are from his collection. Barton donated most of his collection to the Hearst Museum in 1918.

During his time in the Philippines, Barton wrote the books The Half-Way Sun, Ifugao Law, Kalinga Customs, and Ifugao Mythology, to name a few, which detailed his learnings about cultures and customs in the Cordilleria region. Barton was one of the first Americans to give a description of the Pilipino people, and his findings were the canon of Pilipino ethnographic study in a frame we would not call “salvage” anthropology.

Beyond Barton

While Barton is the primary collector and photographer of the objects presented, this exhibit has no intention of centering him nor his monolithic accounts of Pilipino culture. Instead, we intend to use the objects and photographs he obtained to deepen our understanding of the Philippines’ sociopolitical climate in the early 1900s. Although his collections show the Philippines from a Western voyeuristic perspective, they were the only ones readily available to access at the Hearst Museum. With this in mind, we would also like to recognize the labor and contributions of unnamed Pilipino individuals and groups whose contributions made Barton’s and our projects possible.

In the 2006 article “Archives of the New Possession,” scholar Ricardo L. Punzalan discusses the idea of care imposed by the Spanish and American colonial governments through collections of archives and the nationalizing/centralizing documents that colonists forced on Pilipinos. This creation of national archives is one of many examples of salvage anthropology in the Philippines. Colonial governments collected and recorded identities and everyday practices under the guise of care, although this centralized knowledge offered no real purpose or benefit to the everyday Pilipino person.

However, caring extends beyond documentation and Barton’s approach of “salvaging whatever is left.” By centering Indigenous experiences, we show how Pilipinos preserved their cultures—many of which are still thriving to this day. Through this, we hope to deconstruct the mainstream neutral and monolithic understanding of Pilipino history. We also hope to present alternative perspectives on the Pilipino people that show them not as passive participants to colonization, but as active resistors and protectors of their communities, whether on the battlefield or in everyday life.

While this exhibit focuses on care and resistance, it is crucial to acknowledge the underlying paradox of examining a museum archive to find objects of resistance. Each photograph, basket, or other artifact within the catalogue continues to inflict colonial harm. Many object labels, for instance, arbitrarily group different native communities into the monolithic “Philippines” category or include blatantly racist descriptions. Moreover, photography as an inherently voyeuristic medium for ethnography underscores the power dynamics present, where the subjects are studied but almost never identified beyond “white” or “native.” The museum’s role as a colonial institution therefore continues to perpetuate anti-indigenous sentiments, intergenerational trauma, and the loss of identities.

If we are to criticize the system that allowed a school teacher to conduct anthropological and ethnographic studies on indigenous people, we must ask the question: How do we reconstruct relationships between objects and collector? One solution is by focusing on care through mutual aid and community – solidarity, not charity. This exhibit does not attempt to define “care,” but proposes different pathways to achieve this goal. We must consider who is being cared for, and who is caring. What do they care for?

Whether or not it is possible to fully decolonize museums remains in question, but this exhibit hopes to address the curators’ obligation to “care” by illuminating suppressed stories.