All-Party Parliamentary Group: Afrikan Reparations, African Restitution

On July 12th Johanna Zetterstrom-Sharp was delighted to represent MEGs work on repatriation at an APPG on restitution, Chaired by Bell Ribeiro-Addy MP, at the House of Commons, in partnership with AFFORD. This was the first of three sessions, focusing on mapping and provenance research, with following sessions focusing on changing the law and funding initiatives. It was a very pro-active conversation, focusing on what kind of support the APPG could provide. Further details about the APPG can be found here: https://www.parallelparliament.co.uk/APPG/afrikan-reparations

 

Committee Vacancy 2023 - MEG Chair.

Museum Ethnographers Group are a UK-based, but international collective, whose members include:

Museum professionals, academics, researchers & students, artists, activists & enthusiasts

Originally established in 1975, MEG has a long history of bringing individuals, institutions and museum collections together to build knowledge and understanding.

MEG believes that our museums have an important role to play in building understanding, foregrounding respect, and caring for each other. However, this is predicated on institutional and practical changes that we all have a responsibility to work towards. We cannot do this work alone and so we use our platform to support each other, share best practice, and collectively work towards a better future.

MEG is an active interface between museum professionals and university-based researchers and is recognised in the UK museums sector as a key subject-specialist network.

MEG is a volunteer run organisation and we are currently looking for Chair to join our Committee from April 2023, with opportunities for shadowing from September. The Committee currently consists of:

-          Chair

-          Secretary

-          Treasurer

-          Individual Membership Officer

-          Journal Membership Officer

-          Digital/Web co-ordinator

-          Events Officer

As Chair, you will take a leadership role in the administration of MEG’s committee. This includes building a new future for MEG and the sector as a whole.

Main responsibilities include:

·       Work with other committee members to develop the scope and focus of MEG

·       Chair Quarterly committee meetings and the annual AGM

·       Be the primary contact and help shape the annual conference

·       Develop partnerships with research and practice based projects and finding iniatives

·       To provid quarterly reports

·       To play a key role in delivering MEG’s digital development project.

 

The role would suit someone who:

-          Would like to develop their leadership experience.

-          Has an established professional career within the museums sector, and experience working with/understands the issues facing cultural collections.

-          Enjoys thinking through and holding conversations about the questions facing the sector, and is passionate about driving action and change.

-          Values practice-based knowledge and skills sharing.

We welcome early expressions of interest from across the membership who can commit for a minimum of 3 years, and will ask for formal applications to be circulated prior to next years AGM taking place in April 2023.

Deadline for applications is February 2023, but we are reaching out now to ensure there is time to discuss the role and reach as many people as possible.

To apply, or ask any questions, please contact the current chair, Johanna Zetterstrom-Sharp, at cchair@museumethnographersgroup.org.uk 

MEG Conference 2022 - Write Up by Amie KIrby.

 A word from our Chair

Thank you to everyone to made it to the MEG conference this year, including the incredible speakers who generously shared their thinking and practice, challenging us all to approach our work in news ways. A particular thanks to National Museums Scotland for hosting us, and putting on such a well-planned couple of days. After two years of online conversation, it was wonderful to catch up with friends and colleagues, and a real reminder of what makes MEG so unique as a community. 

 

This year’s Bursary holders, Amie Kirby and Rhea Blem were tasked with writing a blog about their experiences of the conference. They capture some of the conversations that were had, and offer critical insight that I think we can all learn from. I was particularly struck by Aime's reflection on the radical - a term which as she articulates so well has a moral capital, drawn on through change-oriented language used by museums with increasing confidence. 

 

Amie Kirby is an early career professional in the museums & heritage field. She currently works for Stockport War Memorial Art Gallery and is available for freelance projects. She holds a BA in Archaeology from the University of Durham, an MA in Art Gallery & Museum Studies from the University of Manchester, and is active in various political organising groups across Manchester. She is interested in the foregrounding of decolonial and abolitionist perspectives in the museum, seeing this space as a site of care-centred, relational practice.

 

“After all, radical simply means ‘grasping things at the root’”

Angela Y. Davis, Women Culture and Politics (1989)

I thought about this quote a lot on my train journey home from MEG 2022. My first time attending any academic conference, this event also was the first time I had met any MEG members in person since joining earlier this year. As a fresh-faced “early career professional” recently out of postgraduate study and considering a PhD, my motivation for attending was to engage not only with the latest invigorating research and chatter permeating the sector, but with people who believe similarly to me – that museums can be agents of social change.

Whilst there were many stimulating, insightful, and productive presentations, provocations and Q&A sessions, and I will summarise my favourites shortly, I couldn’t help but think of the above quote from Davis when reflecting on the many and varied ways in which the work being done is described as “radical”. As it was noted in the plenary discussion, Sara Wajid had previously called the group “quiet activists”. In a similar vein to the use of “radical”, there is much to unpack in the connotations of museum work being “activist”; notably in its romanticisation as Dr. Ayesha Fuentes noted. Moreover, with the decolonisation agenda firmly planted in institutions’ consciousness, how much “activist” museum work is quiet – and how much should it be?

This short summary of my experience at #MEG2022 aims to emphasise that, whilst amazing work is being done, there remains much to do – and it’s our collective responsibility to empower and amplify the voices of the communities who are the most excluded or marginalised by our institutions (Sheila Asante used the term “priority communities” and it has since remained fixed in my vocabulary).

Relationship-oriented Practice

One of the key themes running throughout multiple sessions of the conference was that of co-production. This brought about important critical points, such as how to approach those you wish to work with – instead of expecting them to come to you, how to recognise and act to correct the power imbalances between institution and community, the problems of “community” itself as a homogenising term, and how to ensure relationships are sustainable past the completion of a project.

These issues point towards a greater reckoning of “value” in the museums sector. As Miles Greenwood astutely pointed out, museums have the potential to hold value, i.e. in being freely accessed in cases where there is no admission charge, but their value is far from innate and is not something to be taken for granted. Indeed, the value of museums and the work we find ourselves in is constructed – and once we recognise this, we must question who imposes this value and to which ends. This was further emphasised by Sheila Asante’s provocation that in order to embed care-centred, relational practices into museum work, we must “flip the narrative”. Rather than asking how we can engage our priority communities, we must ask: why encourage people to engage in the perpetuation of trauma? What would their involvement do to enrich their own understanding and wellbeing?

Once this is understood, it is imperative to change the ways in which we work with people. As Asante noted, this must involve the very structures and processes of decision-making that permeate our work; when we lead with the importance of process, there is great scope to understand cultivated relationships as an ongoing process – not a “decolonial” tick-box. Many of the talks across Day 1 highlighted the importance of relationship-oriented practice, such as Dr Karen Jacobs, whose work with Māori artist George Nuku emphasised the importance of privileging Indigenous worldviews which emphasise the relationships between people, and their relationship to land.

Elaborating in the Q&A session, Jacobs asserted a wariness of relationships constructed for or in tandem with a project – as relationships should be reciprocal, longstanding, community-led, and “not extractive”. Similarly, Rosa Dyer noted the importance of building relationships between two individuals, rather than the homogenising and spurious categories of “institution” and “community”. In this way, we must not only rethink structures and processes embedded in our institutions – but we must continually interrogate the place we hold in these institutions and how we carry ourselves as such.

We Must Reinvent to Move Forwards

“But the urgency for decolonisation didn’t come from us! It came from activists out there, indigenous communities out there” – Prof Wayne Modest

In realising the need to diverge from our identities as agents of museum institutions, it becomes apparent that we must break out of the museum walls, so to speak, and to reinvent if we are to engage with the individuals we wish to reach in a way that is meaningful to them. One of the primary ways to do so is to step outside of our conceptions of the important work our institutions do, and to realise instead that relationship-centred, care-grounded community work is being done all the time, it already exists – just outside of museums. By being more aware and mindful of where work already exists, we can begin to look inwards and see where our museums may, or may not, serve, supplement, and amplify this work.

One example I was rather captivated with was that of the Nigeria60 project by the Horniman Museum & Gardens, discussed by Dr Johanna Zetterstrom-Sharp. This project, produced in collaboration with Alafuro Sikoki-Coleman and other prominent Nigerian creatives, explores and celebrates the global impact of Nigerian creativity and directly brings this into conversation with collections of Nigerian material in the Horniman. Here, contemporary collecting of creative material was used as a method to interrogate existing collections with more accountability and criticality whilst using the process of creativity to form an “anti-collection”, in which ideas of fixing, permanence and centrality are refuted. As Zetterstrom-Sharp illustrated, this project serves to remind us that creativity is flourishing all the time, especially outside of museums. By emphasising creation and creativity, museums are better placed to don the role of facilitators, as opposed to animators or controllers of the narrative. This is again supported by Karen Jacobs’ description of the work completed with George Nuku – whereby nurturing relationships with artists and activists can lead to work that challenges the role of institutions.

Where Next: Interdisciplinary, Collaboration, and Grasping at the Root

One of the most exciting elements of this conference was the Work In Progress session, where current PhD students presented their research. The presentations themselves and the Q&A that followed felt dialogic and engaging; allowing speakers the opportunity to receive feedback on their work, and audience members to be provided with fresh, critical thought. Amy Shakespeare’s presentation on “Exhibiting Absence”, for example, was well-conceived and thought-provoking, putting forwards some of the arguments mentioned in this article – such as prioritising the formation of relationships between individuals.

Shakespeare’s use of “the three radicals” (radical trust, radical hope, and radical empathy) as a methodological basis prompted questions surrounding the use, or over-use, of ‘radical’ as terminology. Indeed, we must interrogate our language use continually whilst it changes at rapid pace; this includes recognising that larger institutions are guilty of co-opting or romanticising terms such as “radical” (which are often politically-charged) to denote a wildly different or innovative way of doing things; when in fact this way of doing things has been commonplace for many groups on the peripheries of our networks. Indeed, as I asserted at the beginning of this article, Angela Y. Davis says that radical simply means “to grasp at the root”: to get to the root cause of what you are trying to do and who you are trying to form relationships with. This should not be wildly innovative.

Conclusion

#MEG2022 has proved that museums are at their best when they are for and within the communities they serve. As practitioners, we are at our best when we work together: across distance and across disciplines. The prioritising of relationships and sustainable, embedded care-oriented practice holds true power to enable our users to define the value of museums for themselves: changing institutional culture beyond short-term participatory projects.

As an Early Career Professional whose interests lie in the intersection between museums and political organising, it is welcomed and refreshing to hear so many assertions of what should be done differently in order to prioritise relational working. The next step, whilst difficult, is to let such provocations spur us to action – to work together step-by-step to plot how change can occur in our institutions from the ground-up. As MEG member Mario Tuki from Rapa Nui noted in the end discussion, priority communities are more than capable of speaking for themselves. Arguably, the way we commit to change is to decentre ourselves.

MEG Conference 2022 - Post-conference Reflection by Rhea Blem

A word from our Chair

Thank you to everyone to made it to the MEG conference this year, including the incredible speakers who generously shared their thinking and practice, challenging us all to approach our work in news ways. A particular thanks to National Museums Scotland for hosting us, and putting on such a well-planned couple of days. After two years of online conversation, it was wonderful to catch up with friends and colleagues, and a real reminder of what makes MEG so unique as a community. 

 

This year’s Bursary holders, Amie Kirby and Rhea Blem were tasked with writing a blog about their experiences of the conference. They capture some of the conversations that were had, and offer critical insight that I think we can all learn from. I was particularly struck by Aime's reflection on the radical - a term which as she articulates so well has a moral capital, drawn on through change-oriented language used by museums with increasing confidence. 

 

Rhea Blem is completing her master’s in Art history of the African continent at Freie Universität Berlin. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Art history and English Literature from the University of Zurich, she has worked as a research, curatorial and teaching assistant at the Kunsthaus Zurich, the University of Zurich, and the Max Plank Institute for Art History in Rome. Her master thesis investigates “collecting” practices in late 19^th to early 20^th century KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa in the context of extractive colonialism. Her research interests include the arts and material cultures of the African continent, colonial practices of “collection”, accumulation, and display, postcolonial provenance research, and exploring possibilities for restorative, anti-colonial, and anti-racist approaches to (art-)history and museology.

Post-conference Reflection

Rhea Blem

 

Arriving in Edinburgh from Berlin on the 27^th of April, I was not sure what to expect. The 2022 MEG Conference was the first larger event I would be attending in person since before the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. Looking forward to and simultaneously feeling slightly nervous of human-to-human conversations, I consoled myself with the thought that we were all a little bit “out of practice” when it came to social interactions. I felt excited to spend the following days among people who shared an interest in thinking about museum pasts and presents in order to shape better futures within and beyond museums. Having only recently applied for MEG membership, I knew no one else and was initially quite overwhelmed with the number of people who turned up at the National Museum of Scotland on Thursday morning. Quite soon though, I realised I was not the only one feeling this way and adjusted to the new space, which was already buzzing with lively discussions, and people greeting old friends. The collective excitement at finally meeting up again in person was palpable and contagious. I quickly found myself involved in numerous conversations in what I experienced as a warm, welcoming, and open-minded environment.

What followed were two intense, very interesting days of talks, discussions, exchanges, reflections, which I have decided not to summarise in detail. Instead, I want to revisit the beginning and end of the conference, touch upon recurring themes, and share some thoughts on what struck me as particularly important, what moved me and continues to accompany me now, almost two months later.
In the introduction to the conference, Dr Samuel Alberti (NMS) asked how we can make world culture museums relevant for contemporary and diverse audiences. This served as a point of departure for the subsequent “provocations” panel, which explored the question: How can we make museums relevant for social and environmental justice today?

The respondents spoke about the enduring legacies of colonialism, empire, enslavement, and racism. They stressed the need for museums to be held accountable in addressing and actively disproving these legacies. Sheila Asante (Museum Galleries Scotland) observed that museums, which had been part of a conscious effort to subjugate people historically discriminated against, frequently continue to perpetuate exclusionary and racist narratives. These ways of telling “history through the lens of white [middle class] people” continue to feed the assumption that museums are for certain people and not for “Others”. Museums, Sheila Asante argues, need to develop “racial literacy” and anti-racism needs to be embedded in work structures and museum practices. Miles Greenwood (Glasgow Life) recentred the educational value and responsibility of museums to confront the challenges faced by our societies today (racism, poverty, structural inequality, climate change…). Miles Greenwood also questioned what value is created through increasing the perceived relevance of museums and whom this value serves, asking: What are museums doing to provide social justice for marginalised communities?

 This question was echoed by Nelson Cummins (Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights), who criticised the lack of engagement with questions of empire, colonialism, and racism in some museums, as well as a frequent failure to mention anticolonial resistance and agency of (formerly) colonised peoples. Insisting that museums can be sites of learning and critical engagement, Nelson Cummins argued that museums need to acknowledge not only the history of racism and colonialism, but how these continue to shape our present. Dr Peter Loovers’ (University of St Andrews) contribution reminded of the need to bring social and environmental justice together in tackling issues such as global heating, and of the central role of indigenous peoples in this process. This point resurfaced in subsequent papers that addressed ethnographic collections as “environmental archives” with capabilities to facilitate intercultural and interspecies knowledge dialogues (Rosa Dyer, Birkbeck, University of London and Pitt Rivers Museum), collaborative approaches to research on and conservation of “biocultural” collections (Dr Mark Nesbitt et al., Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and Birkbeck, University of London), and indigenous (creative) responses to addressing the colonial dimensions of climate change (Dr Karen Jacobs, Sainsbury Research Unit).

The provocations discussed the challenges and structural problems of the museum sector, but also highlighted the possibilities for museums to potentially function as spaces for learning about and furthering the cause of social justice, for (re)building trust, for community engagement, for healing, for reflection, for restitution[1], for reparations, for forging new narratives, for imagining and shaping better futures, locally, as well as on a planetary level.

Many of the papers presented over the following days would pick up on these aspects, notably the participation  of historically marginalised and/or descendant communities. Several speakers reiterated the necessity for sustainable, long-term partnerships and relationships based on trust, and long-term funding in efforts to put these principles into practice. The equal (re)valuation of and exchange between different forms of knowledge was another returning theme. This should entail equivalent and adequate value (including financially) for participants contributing “indigenous knowledges”. Yet how can this be ensured within ongoing structures of (global) inequality and asymmetries of power? I have also been wondering about the value afforded to the emotional labour invested by descendant and creator communities in these processes. We heard about collaborations, co-curations, and co-production of knowledge(s), about interdisciplinary approaches to provenance research, about repatriation as a historically situated practice, about how social and environmental (and perhaps epistemic) justice need to be thought in conjunction, about reactivations and reanimations of “objects”, emotional and spiritual aspects of working with “colonial collections” and ancestral remains, about museums as process and the potential of impermanence.
It was interesting and also personally relevant to me to hear Dr Giovanna Vitelli (The Hunterian), Dr Briony Widdis (Queens University Belfast), Dr Jeremiah Garsha (University College Dublin) and Mark Hall (Perth Museum and Art Gallery) speak about the specificities of addressing legacies of empire and colonialism in (Northern) Ireland and Scotland. Although I grew up for the most part in Switzerland, my family on my father’s side are white South Africans of mostly British, and, (perhaps not) incidentally, predominantly Scottish descent. Understanding how I am implicated in (ongoing) histories of colonialism and racism, and how this informs and motivates my research, is an ongoing process. I therefore appreciated Briony Widdis’ frank self-positioning regarding her own colonial ancestry as an introduction to her talk. Thinking further about particularities of Scottish or Irish participation in projects of empire and colonialism seems crucial, if issues related to social justice, racism and structural inequality are to be addressed.
As someone who has spent many years observing museums from the “outside” as a student and university researcher, but who aims, eventually, to work in the museum sector, gaining insight into some of the practical challenges, which museum professionals encounter on an everyday basis, was an especially helpful aspect of the conference. Even though I am aware that implementing theoretical approaches to the “ethics” of curation, display, and “care” of “colonial collections” is rarely straight forward, hearing directly from museum professionals about the complexities, challenges, and affective dimensions of their work, is fascinating and humbling. Contributors  reflected on the practicalities of restitution, storage, conservation, and questions of classification with critical self-awareness and humility. Dr Lucie Carreau and Sam Daisely’s honest account of their attempts to respectfully interact with human remains, acknowledged not practical as well as emotional aspects of the “Stores move” project at MAA, Cambridge. Hearing these testimonies touched and impressed me.
I was especially heartened by and would like to highlight the “work-in-progress” papers of the “early-career” PhD researchers (Melissa Shiress, Amy Shakespeare, Nathalie Cooper, Alba Ferrándiz Gaudens, but also Rosa Dyer), who presented convincing approaches to dealing with cultural heritage collected in contexts of colonial injustice.
In a talk on the South African collections at the Horniman Museum, Nathalie Cooper (University of Warwick) referred to Dr Wandile Kasibe’s description of the museum as a colonial “crime scene”, and ethnography as tool of empire and racist violence. These violent legacies are still very much alive in our institutions, in our methods, and in ways of seeing and representing formerly colonised people and places. As we heard at the outset of the conference, these legacies  need to be addressed and repaired by museums, who continue to profit from the absence of cultural heritage in places “of origin”.
For institutions built on dispossession and violence (symbolic, structural, and physical), whose self-image as places that accumulate, store and ostensibly “care for” the cultural heritage of people who continue to be constructed as “Other”, what does “decolonisation” actually mean?
Possible ways forward were proposed in Dr Johanna Zetterstrom-Sharp’s (Horniman Museum and Gardens) talk on the “anti-collection”, which questioned the very nature of museums as spaces with and for collections. The paper offered suggestions for museums to move beyond the logic of accumulation and retention that has shaped their identities and actions. Similar questions were addressed by PhD researcher Amy Shakespeare (University of Exeter), who proposed a “return and explain” approach and explored the potential of engaging with “empty spaces” left behind by objects when they return to places or communities of belonging. These presentations raised questions about the role of restitution in a wider anticolonial framework.
It is absolutely crucial to celebrate every small step in the direction of more equitable relations between museums and descendant communities as well as the growing awareness about colonialism and racism. Nonetheless, I was left with the overwhelming realisation of how much still remains be done. Notwithstanding the comforting examples of “successful” projects, such as the first restitution of “Benin Bronze” from a UK institution by the University of Aberdeen (Neil Curtis) or the possibilities offered by digital technologies to facilitate and enhance encounters and connections between people, places, and things (Louisa Minkin et al; Alice Watterson et al; Dr Ali Clark et al), it seems vital, at this point, not to become complacent. As Neil Curtis admitted, “if you’re more than a hundred years late there’s no sense in saying you’re ‘first’”. The work that lies before us is essential and long overdue. It is unsettling, uncomfortable, and leads into the unknown. Keeping in mind that “decolonization is not a metaphor”[2], as Jeremiah Garsha and Amy Shakespeare cautioned, we need to ask ourselves what museums and what, in particular, white museum and university professionals, including myself, are willing to give up, to further the cause and urgent need for decolonisation? “True” decolonisation  must lead to social-economic justice, i.e., restitution and reparations, and is, ultimately, “not about museums” (Neil Curtis). It has thus become clear, that for museums to be(come) relevant, they need to become instruments of social and environmental change. And this change must serve the needs and wishes of those who have been negatively impacted by the often violent extraction of natural and cultural resources under colonialism, empire, and racism.
I was moved and motivated by the varied and sometimes vulnerable accounts of people’s experiences of working with or on “ethnographic collections”, increasingly together with descendant communities, and of how they are addressing colonial continuities in their institutions. In concluding, I want to recentre questions of positionality and representation by revisiting a prescient statement made in the closing discussion: Mario Tuki (Museo de Rapa Nui, Isla de Pascua, Chile) observed that although repatriation had been mentioned in many of the talks, there had been a lot of talking about and talking for indigenous and marginalised communities. The assertion that there were “communities who could speak for themselves” and the consequent call for a “more balanced testimony of people doing the work on repatriation” was met with an uneasy silence. This silence lingered on and stayed with me after the conference. It reinforced, for me, the urgent need for fundamental and structural change as well as the importance of listening to and actually hearing the voices of people who have been marginalised through European colonial narratives and actions. The recognition that this was still a very white space, also made me question my own position as a white, middle class educated,  “early career” researcher who wishes to contribute to processing colonial history with and perhaps at some point without “world culture collections”.
Prioritising antiracist work on a personal, institutional and societal level and striving for structural change, seems even more urgent in the light of these remarks. Returning to the questions posed in the introduction – “how can we make world culture museums relevant for contemporary and diverse audiences?” and “how can we make museums relevant for social and environmental justice today?” – the participation of people from communities who have been negatively impacted by colonialism, empire, and racism, is key. “Contemporary and diverse audience” need to be part of shaping the futures of museums, not only as audiences or external advisors but on all levels.
Nonetheless, as was made apparent through the provocations, and by the remarks outlined above, museums continue to function as spaces of exclusion and, in some cases, re-traumatisation. As Sheila Asante rightly asked, “Why would you want to participate in a racist museum?” Considering the history of museums, ethnography, and other colonial disciplines as tools of empire and racial violence, and the fact that museums still often re-enact or fail to deconstruct this violence, maybe we should be asking ourselves a different question. For museums to be(come) relevant and accessible to “contemporary and diverse audiences”, and for them to contribute to social and environmental justice today, they need, first and foremost, to become safer, less violent, and more inclusive. So, how can we make world culture museums safer places, not only for “contemporary and diverse audiences”, but for fellow researchers, collaborators, and co-creators, including for members of descendant communities? This question could and should, I think, be extended to events such as this conference where we discuss possible futures of museums.
Realising that the same ideologies and structures that enabled the removal of “objects” from people to whom they belonged, continue to shape our border regimes that violently restrict people’s freedom of movement today, and the added injustice that formerly colonized people and places are disproportionately endangered by the effects of global heating, re-affirms the responsibility of museums and other institutions with colonial histories, but also the need for political action and change. This is a vast and intimidating task, but one which I believe is already underway, and one which people all over the world understand to be essential and are committed to being a part of. The wide range of institutional affiliations of people attending the 2022 MEG Conference attests to the will of many individuals to confront the colonial legacies and racism in their institutions, to focus resources and skills on building trust, to learn and unlearn, to repair. Attending the conference impressed upon me the significance of community for this work, of forming mutually supportive relationships through knowledge exchange and social interactions.
It was incredibly special and a privilege to be able to take part in the 2022 MEG Conference. I am very thankful for the opportunity. I am happy for the many friendly and engaging conversations, grateful to those who charmingly coaxed me out of my shyness, who made me feel part of this community. I look forward to joining again in subsequent years, to seeing new and known faces, and to contributing to creating an open, inclusive environment for discussing and drafting visions of how to build better futures, both within, and beyond museums.

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[1] During the conference, the term “repatriation” was mostly frequently used. I choose to use the term “restitution”, which alludes to the actual act of “taking” as well as the act of “giving back” to a place or people of “origin”.
[2] Tuck, E., Yang, K. W., “Decolonization is not a metaphor”, in: Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2012), pp. 1-40.