At an international conference in Canada on Indigenous curatorship in 1996, Awhina Tamarapa, then a Māori curator from the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa), spoke about the display of the pātaka (food storehouse) called Te Tākinga in the exhibition Mana Whenua (Figure 13.1). From her description of how she worked with her tribal community Ngāti Pikiao to develop and interpret the exhibit, it was clear that her practice as a curator, while recognisably curatorial, reflected a distinctively Māori perspective. According to Tamarapa, she did not speak about or for the people, rather she spoke with them. She stressed that the object was not an inert artefact but a taonga (treasure), a living object-being; and that the exhibit did not talk only about the tribal past, but also about the present and future. In sum, her conception of the curator’s role was not that of the authoritative expert speaking from within an academic discipline, but of the facilitator working within and between both a museological and an Indigenous framework. 1 As a curator, she aimed to reconnect the community with their alienated cultural heritage, helping them to reclaim it as their own, and in the process deliberately marginalising her role as curatorexpert and minimising the ethnographic authority of the national museum. The label text for the finished exhibit stated modestly that the research, the planning and the reconstruction of the pātaka was the work of ‘our elders’, who worked in a ‘co-operative relationship’with Te Papa. The people have ‘made this house our own again’under the patronage of Tāne-whakapiripiri (Tāne-who-unites), the spiritual guardian of these and all other wooden carvings in the museum. 2

The museum, James Clifford reminds us,‘is an inventive, globally and locally translated form, no longer anchored to its modern origins in Europe’. 3 In this volume we argue that curatorship may similarly be recalled and remade through collaborative relationships with communities and ‘experiments in culture’. 4 What can museums of ethnography in the Americas and Europe learn from the experience of nations where distinctive forms of Indigenous museology are emerging and reshaping the