COLONIAL HERITAGE: EXPLORING KNOWLEDGE ORGANISATION SYSTEMS WITHIN MUSEUMS

 Breaking the Glass Case | Chantelle Perreault

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All museums have standardised systems of knowledge organisation. Record-keeping practices, thesauri, and classification systems such as nomenclature are just a few examples; these standardise the ways in which information is recorded and understood. To some extent, all museums rely on pre-defined categories for knowledge organisation, and this shapes the way we think about the objects they keep in their collections. 

A display at Le Musée des Abénaki in Quebec | Source

When it comes to standardising knowledge, scholar Hannah Turner notes that the creation of a knowledge organisation system is a “world-building exercise” in which certain narratives are overlooked in favour of others. While all knowledge frameworks must have defined boundaries, this is an important consideration to keep in mind when thinking about how we interpret objects from a museum’s collection; whose voice is included, and whose is excluded?

Many museum classification systems are based in colonial practices, and so in many instances, the colonial roots of a museum impact the manner in which records were historically categorised. Sandra Littletree, a Diné/Eastern Shoshone professor at the University of Washington’s Information School, along with Zuni/Tlingit professor Miranda Belard-Lewis and Arizona State University professor Marisa Duarte, note that colonialism has been paramount in shaping the practices of knowledge organisation. Colonial collections within museums, as noted by Turner, often began as a study of “otherness” — encounters with cultures and peoples that were considered to be “unknown”. Several events in the 19th century — such as the development of the natural sciences and the theory of evolution, the advancement of anthropology, and the increase in ethnographic collecting practices — affected how heritage items were collected, interpreted, and classified. In some instances, the act of ordering and classifying itself can be connected to relationships of power, and so it is important to consider the institutional goals of categorisation, and whose voice is being heard.

The field of Indigenous Knowledge Organisation (IKO) emerged with the goal of decolonising Eurocentric approaches to knowledge organisation. As noted by Littletree et al., there are “fundamental ontological differences between western oriented systems of knowledge and Indigenous ways of knowing”. She defined IKO as “the methodologies and means by which Native and Indigenous peoples create protocols to cohere, name, articulate, collate, and make accessible objects that indicate Indigenous knowledge” – this emerged in contrast to the colonial history of knowledge organisation.

Rather than an attempt to reform existing knowledge organisation practices, IKO is a “practice of liberation”, centering instead, as Littletree explains, the Indigenous experience as well as issues including self-determination and ethical access to knowledge. The Eurocentric approach to knowledge organisation is not the only approach, and often it does not reflect the whole story of non-Eurocentric objects.

As sites of knowledge production and knowledge dissemination, museums have a responsibility to consider the narratives that they are circulating. Critically thinking about the ways in which we interpret and categorise heritage items is a crucial step towards a more diligent system of knowledge organisation.

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