Of, By, and For Which People? Government and Contested Heritage in the American Midwest

Two government-owned and managed heritage sites in Indiana, USA, offer an opportunity to explore the role of governments in adjudicating the competing paradigms of value and contested uses. Strawtown Koteewi is a Hamilton County park and Mounds State Park is part of the Indiana Department of Natural Resources statewide park system. Each site has come under scrutiny in recent years. Strawtown Koteewi is one of the most significant sites in the area for understanding the history of Native peoples. After almost a decade of archaeological excavations, several Native American groups, under the auspices of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), initiated repatriation processes for the recovery of human remains, and some objected to the ongoing archaeological research. At Mounds State Park a coalition of citizens opposed a planned dam project intended to ensure a safe and plentiful water supply and to spur economic development in the area. In each case, the government entities have had to navigate the political landscapes of competing claims about the sites. These case studies expose the fissures between authorized heritage discourse and the paradigms of meaning among the diverse constituencies of the sites, and they highlight the tenuous position of public governance in privileging competing cultural, economic, and social interests. While not unique, the state and county agencies’ positions within these fields of power and their strategic choices reveal some of the barriers and constraints that limit their actions as well as the deep-seated ideologies of policies that perpetuate settler colonial politics in the control and interpretation of indigenous heritage

Hope Without Consolation: Prospects for Critical Learning at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights

Accepted version of manuscripthttps://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10714413.2015.102884

The National Museum of Immigration History (Paris; France): Neo-Colonialist Representations, Silencing, and Re-appropriation

This article focuses on the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration (National Museum of Immigration History – CNHI, Paris), the only national museum fully dedicated to the celebration of the positive contributions of immigrants to France. Using postcolonial theories and the notion of museum friction, it charts the conflicting processes and decisions at play in, first, the translation of the aims and goal of the CNHI into the museography and interpretation of the collections. Second, it analyses critically the usages made of this heritage space, particularly its unauthorised occupation (one of the longest unauthorised occupations of a museum in France) by illegal workers for four months, from October 2010 to January 2011. I wrote this article from the viewpoint of a second generation immigrant, one of the key targeted visitors of the CNHI. This article is also based on participant observation of each aspect of this heritage space, careful observation of its uses, and semi-structured interviews conducted with the CNHI staff, illegal workers who occupied this heritage space, and human rights organisations which supported its occupation