 Hi, hello everyone and welcome to the fifth lecture in the Decolonizing Curating in the Museum in Southeast Asia series, which is jointly organized by the Southeast Asia Art Academic Programme, so as University of London and the Asian Civilized Museum Singapore. Let me just, so actually this is the second to last lecture in the series and you can sign up for the final one, which is next Thursday at the same time by scanning that QR code. My name is Conan Chiang, I'm a curator for Southeast Asia at the ACM and I will be your host for this online event. I'd just like to thank the Alpha Web Foundation and the Chris Foundation for the support of this series, and also my co-organizer, Dr. Stephen Murphy at SOAS for making this collaboration between our two institutions possible. So we are recording today's session and it will be available on the SOAS Center for Southeast Asia Studies page afterwards if you want to watch it again. Okay, so today we are very pleased to have Dr. Ricardo Punzalan with his lecture, Decolonization in Colonial Institutions, Reparative Approaches to Philippine Collections in US University. So with that, Dr. Punzalan gives his talk. We will have a response by Dr. Christina Martinez Juan, who I'll introduce later. And finally, we will take some questions from the audience, which you can type into the Q&A box, please click the Q&A box and not the chat box. You can type your questions in at any time in the presentation and we will take it at the end of the session. So before I do let me introduce Dr. Punzalan, Dr. Ricardo Punzalan is an associate professor at the University of Michigan, where he teaches archives and digital curation. He studies access and use of digitized anthropological archives and ethnographic data by academic and indigenous researchers. He is currently a research associate at the Smithsonian's National Anthropological Archives and a former council member of the Society of American Archivists. So just please note that Dr. Punzalan will not be using PowerPoint slides in his presentation so you know don't be alarmed if you don't see anything on your screen. And yeah, with that, Dr. Punzalan over to you. Thank you. I would like to thank the organizers of this lecture series, particularly Dr. Stephen Murphy for the invitation to speak at this event and for Conan Chung for co hosting. I'm also grateful to Dr. Christina Martinez one for agreeing to serve as my discussant for today. So I grew up in the Philippines, but I currently work and reside in the state of Michigan. So I would like to proceed I'd like to give a land acknowledgement. So the University of Michigan is located on the traditional territory of the unashamed people. In 1817 the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Bodewatomie Nations made the single largest land transfer to the University of Michigan. This was offered ceremonially as a gift through the Treaty of the Foot of the Rapid so that their children could be educated. Through these words of acknowledgement, their contemporary and ancestral ties to the land and their contributions to the University are renewed and reaffirmed. My goal today is to discuss how I come to understand decolonization and how it might operate as a framework for managing, representing and engaging with the sizable Philippine collections at the University of Michigan. This constitutes reparative work in the decolonization of the University's Philippine collections. In answering this question I wish to present what I learned so far from an ongoing effort called ReConnect ReCollect reparative connections to Philippine collections at the University of Michigan, which is a two year project that I'm co leading with Deirdre De La Cruz, Associate Professor of History and Asian Languages and Cultures, and in partnership with librarians, archivists, curators, and collections managers in three university institutions. And these are the University of Michigan's Bentley Historical Library with about 259 collections in their catalog pertaining to the Philippines. The Special Collections Research Center, which holds approximately 50 collections of archival and manuscript material relating to Spanish American war, the Philippine war. The University of Michigan's involvement in the Philippines by a scientific investigations and also about 1500 published works on Philippine history and culture. And the third is the Museum of Anthropological Archaeology with 25,000 archaeological artifacts, 72 human crania and several hundred post-cranial elements, 1,800 ethnographic objects, 42 zoological specimens and 617 ethnobotanical specimens. The collection at this museum also includes about 5,000 glass plate negatives and lantern slides. I'd like to note that the University's Philippine collections extend beyond these three partner institutions. Philippine materials are also kept in the following university institutions. The Stern's collection of musical instruments, which has at least 13 items with Philippine provenance in the collection. The Clark Library, which is a repository of maps and ethicists from the 16th century to the present. The Clements Library, which is a repository of rare books and manuscripts. And the Museum of Zoology, which has about 2,000 birds, mollusks of approximately 250 lots representing nearly 1,000 specimens and 150 species, and 3,108 specimens of mammals from the Philippines. There's also the University's Herbarium, which has about 6,000 items from the Philippines, which includes ferns, algae, flowering plants, fungi, mosses, conifers and lichens. And finally, the University's Botanical Gardens, which of course would have Philippine plant species. I'm belaboring, you know, describing the extent of the collection to emphasize a point that there's a sizable Philippine collection in this university. So in May and June of this year, our group facilitated a series of conversations to first define what it means to pursue decolonial praxis for Philippine collections. Second, identify institutional obligations and articulating reparative work. The third is to reimagine community engagement and finally to explore how we can de-center the existing colonial provenance attribution and description to better represent indigenous communities and knowledge to understand the full extent of the collection. Our series of roundtable and listening sessions engage Philippine studies, scholars, archivists, cultural heritage workers, activists, and members of the Filipino community here in Michigan to better understand what constitutes reparative and decolonial approaches to the collections of Philippine materials. We also invited speakers from the Philippines. So decolonization has become widely used in cultural heritage and academic circles. Many have become critical of the many misappropriations of the term. Critical race, indigenous studies and education scholars like Eve Tuck and Wayne Young's essay Decolonization is not a metaphor for instance, had made me reflect on how decolonization might operate in the settler colonialist context of the United States. For Tuck and Young, decolonization was about indigenous sovereignty and self-determination, or the return of stolen land to native tribes as the scope and scale of the colonial struggle. As such, it's used in libraries, archives and museums, such as decolonize the reading room, decolonize the stacks, decolonizing the catalog, or even our focus today, decolonizing curating and the museum to mean incorporating indigenous knowledge and perspectives in revising our catalogs and databases or exhibit labels in creating a welcoming space and diversifying the staff or in auditing collections for culturally sensitive or stolen items may not be appropriate use of the term unless these practices ultimately result in the return of stolen indigenous lands. To some, it sounds like decolonization is yet another word for knowledge appropriation and extractive relations that only benefit institutions in terms of better audience experience, collections management, diversifying staff and visitors, increasing grant funding support and so on. Thus, the overuse of the term decolonization has impacted its meaning, its attachment to pre-existing frameworks of social justice, though well-meaning can remove its connection to the realities of indigenous life and settler colonialism. But I am not recommending giving up on the use of the term just yet. What I advocate for is a radical reflection and reorientation of the management representation of you and use of Philippine indigenous materials, which document diverse knowledge and traditions, because decolonization can mean many things to many people, and without specificity as to its use as a concept for politics or practice, it threatens to mean little at all. Thus, the challenge for us is to understand decolonization as a meaningful concept in the Philippine historical context and for Filipinos. The issue of decolonizing the Philippine collections that the University of Michigan offers forms of context and considerations, despite the large accumulation of indigenous material at the university. We lack culturally appropriate frameworks and policies for navigating access, building community relations, and instituting reparative actions. Though the Philippines shares a common and connected history of colonialism with US indigenous tribes, our experiences of and receptions to colonialism are not the same. Different cultures respond to colonialism differently. Thus, protocols and guidelines developed for Native American collections are not always appropriate and sustainable in the context of Philippine collections. So far, I have not heard of any requests to repatriate any item held by the university. It might be different case if Philippine indigenous tribes rely on those archival sources and museum artifacts for use in a land claim, or to meet some government recognition requirements like the federal recognition process in the United States. Philippine materials are also not legally covered by NAGPRA, which stands for the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which is the law that protects US Native American graves and requires repatriation of Native American human remains and certain cultural and sacred items. This context challenges us to rethink what the university's institutional obligations to Philippine cultural objects might be. And this in turn affects what we might consider as constituting the decolonization of Philippine collections at this university. Let's go back to my question earlier. What constitutes reparative work in the decolonization of the university's Philippine collections? The focus on reparative work is intentional here because I believe that the sizable volume of Philippine historical, natural, and cultural collections at the university amassed from the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th underscore this institution's role in US colonial expansion. Michigan faculty, students, and alumni went to the Philippines to teach, conduct field research, establish business ventures, and participate in colonial administration. At the height of the US colonial era in the Philippines, Michigan men, as they were called, took pride in their dual identities as Michigan alumni and colonial officials. As George A. Malcolm, the founding dean of the Law School of the University of the Philippines, in his speech in Manila in 1914, while convening the University of Michigan Alumni Association of the Philippine Islands stated, and I quote, In the Philippine Islands, we claim, and we are able to substantiate the same by facts, that the University of Michigan Alumni Association is the largest in number in the Far East. Not only this, but it can be safely asserted that its members occupy as important positions in the affairs of the Philippines as do the alumni of any other university. Even so, from the beginning of the American occupation, so that now there are only Michigan men prominent prominent in official and private circles, but Michigan men in the Army, the Navy, and among the Filipino, Japanese and Chinese communities. The Americans need not be ashamed of their work. It need not fear that its tradition and future are forgotten. All Michigan men in the east of whatever locality or nationality joining the assurance that their alma mater can count upon their cordial support. The presence of the so-called Michigan men in the islands resulted in the accumulation of one of the largest Philippine collections in North America. The ones you associate with these collections are not only limited in the context of their accumulation. In this presentation, I'd like to present two persistent areas of harm associated with these collections. The first is the decades of lack of real and sustainable connections with Philippine communities here in the US and in the Philippines over the management and representation of these materials. After more than a century, it is time for the university to address its colonial complicity in the formation of these collections by developing b-colonial practices so that institutions can provide reciprocal and reparative access to Philippine cultural collections. Reconceptualizing archival and museum work from the perspective of relationships, building where bonds do not exist, or repairing when trust has been broken, has become a significant theme in archives and museum scholarship. We can build on the more recent efforts in b-colonial archives and museology, which foreground indigenous perspectives and community collaboration, consultation and dialogue to construct a model of relationality and shared stewardship. Although we have seen significant progress in centering indigenous knowledge frameworks for North American tribal collections, such as the adoption of the protocols for Native American archival materials, our tribal approaches are still missing for non-North American collections taken from former US colonial territories that are not covered by legal regimes like NAGPRA, the law which I just mentioned earlier. We can also take the methodological approach of reparative work that foregrounds community relationships to inspire culturally-appropriate curation and scholarly endeavors that address the harmful legacies of colonial collections. We can implement b-colonial practice through community consultations rather than apply protocols that are universally defined and enacted for every institution, culture and community. Many current and previous projects have attempted to address the responsibility and care for colonial collections at the level of digital access through the creation of online databases, web access portals or virtual exhibitions. But digital humanities efforts that rely heavily on the creation of digital infrastructures without appropriate investment in building community relations or input into community members can end up reproducing some of the problems they seek to redress, generating new tools for the same epistemologies. If the goal is to facilitate broader community impact, efforts must therefore begin and end with better relationships between institutions and communities. The understanding of reciprocity is informed by the work of Indigenous education scholars Heather McGregor and Michael Marker who provide the following characteristics of the concept. First, reciprocity as giving back or involving power flowing back and forth within parties, ensuring that relationships are not extractive. Second, reciprocity as sharing knowledge or a cyclical and circulating responsibility to teach what one has learned passing on knowledge between generations. Third, reciprocity as relational accountability, where relationships are characterized by respect and the interests of communities inform all aspects of work. Reciprocity as circular and continuous, not a system of gifts and counter gifts, but a constant coexistence and kinship. I take this set of characteristics to be the defining goals of for curatorial and museum reciprocity, relationships, practices and projects that give back and recognize power dynamics, share knowledge, are held accountable and are continuous or sustainable. Curatorial and museum reciprocity must therefore consider the meaningful outcomes and changes that result from reparative interventions. Here I offer six indicators of impact to help us identify our institutional obligations in reparative work, namely knowledge, attitudes, professional discourse, institutional capacity, policy and relationships. So for knowledge, a critical question could be what new knowledge about the collections, their history, representational tools and uses have we discovered. Are we using the collections in meaningful ways and in diverse settings going beyond the exhibition hall, reading rooms and classrooms but into community based learning spaces. What are the attitudes, is there a shift in the attitudes and practices of those who stored the collections around collections management representation access and news, or the community members feel welcome to visit, access consult or use items in the collections or to interact with librarians, archivists, curators or collections managers. In terms of professional discourse. Is there a renewed understanding of responsibilities over collections stewardship and sense of ownership among curators, librarians and archivists responsible for collections care and management here I put ownership in quotes. In institutional capacity, a good question could be, how have we developed a set of guidelines for reparative practice that enables institutions to better represent their collections and better connect with the communities represented in their collections, or perhaps created ways of managing collections. So for policy impact, does the project lead to or inspire efforts to revise or create new institutional, whether written or unwritten policies around collections caring representation. Finally, for impact on relationships, have we facilitated the formation of a reciprocal relationship among institutions, scholars and community members. And I'd like to go next to the second harm that I see from these collections which is the harmful description and metadata and the prevailing and the prevailing and the privileging of colonial provenance and glorification of colonial actors in our finding aids and catalogs. We can be center colonial creators and collectors in finding aids and provide equal attribution to the communities represented by the collections. The racist outdated and culturally insensitive terminologies in finding aids and other descriptive materials can be revisited through the process called reparative description. Archival scholars have in recent years focused their attention on reparative description and corrective action, which seek to redress historical inequities and injustices in the ways language is used in archives and special collections, especially in the social and political context of the United States, we have witnessed in more recent years the rise of racial violence as a social crisis. Archivists would like to read address the crisis of racial inequalities as reflected in the collections collections in Western institutions gathered by virtual colonization materials that contain violent images, or those that depict troubling historical events, including outdated racist incorrect or inappropriate metadata and description are not only distressful to indigenous community members, but they can also limit wider discovery, access and meaningful engagement or use. The aim of reparative description is to find ways to be centered the colonial provenance of collections to better represent indigenous communities and knowledge, as well as gain better understanding of the full extent of those collections. One secret that university collections are often attributed to collectors whose career as academics or civil servants were deeply linked with colonial governance. For example, until recently the whole collection of Philippine archives, rare books and manuscripts at the university's special collections library is attributed to Dean C. Wooster, whose entire career as a colonial administrator was to rationalize the US occupation of the islands. Through his photographic images and writings Wooster depicted Filipinos as savages and fit for self governance and required American tutelage and civilization. We can offer alternative descriptions that highlight the numerous indigenous communities in this collection. The graduate students who conducted the preliminary survey of Philippine collections at the university has noted that for collections in natural history institutions such as the Museum of Zoology, the Arbarium and the Arbarium Gardens, the scientific naming practices in of themselves are not actually indicative of harm, but the use of disciplinary nomenclature does not leave room for cultural or historical context. Thus, they leave the significance of these specimens for Filipino communities and addressed. Consequently, scientific nomenclature elides the relationship that local communities have in these specimens. So we must develop models for culturally responsive and historically minded stewardship and care of Philippine materials in non-Philippine institutions. The Philippine cultural and natural history materials dispersed across various Michigan libraries, archives, museums have been built without any community consultation with Filipinos in the Philippines and in the diaspora. The lack of a comprehensive inventory of the full extent of the Philippine historical, cultural and scientific items at the university further complicates attempts to fully address and utilize these collections. Philippino, Filipino-American, Philippinex communities living in Michigan and in the Philippines seek to develop greater connections and engagement with the Philippine collections at the university. Furthermore, librarians, archivists, curators and collections managers who steward these collections seek to apply reparative approaches to collections care and representation and build better community ties. Thus, to repeat my earlier statement, we can reconceptualize cultural heritage work from the perspective of relationships, building where bonds that do not exist are repairing when trust has been broken. We cannot do this without actively seeking community input. How do we activate the Philippine collections of Michigan to better serve Filipino, Filipino-American and Philippinex communities living in the United States and the state of Michigan and in the Philippines? To do this, we must address the issue of limited access to Michigan's Philippine collections. Regarding the existing access infrastructures that had been built by the university's repositories, it became clear that not only those infrastructures are lacking coordination and integration across multiple units, but community input was almost non-existent. The dispersion of cultural items across the various institutions of the university, the lack of comprehensive descriptive access tools, and missing Filipino voices make discovery and use particularly challenging. At this juncture, it is useful to take our cue from scholars of indigenous archives, Kimberly Kristen and Jane Anderson, who advocate for one mode of decolonizing processes that insist on a different temporal framework, which is the slow archives. According to Kristen and Anderson, slowing down creates a necessary space for emphasizing how knowledge is produced, circulated, contextualized, and exchanged through a series of relationships. Slowing down is about focusing differently, listening carefully, and acting ethically. It opens the possibility of seeing the intricate web of relationships formed and forged through attention to collaborative curation processes that do not default on normative structures of attribution, access, or scale. Focusing on the temporality of slow archives is not meant to post binary between fast and slow. Rather, slowness is imagined and enacted in terms of relationality, positionality, and a framework that privileges restorative and reparative work that is decolonial in its logic and practice. Slow archives do not presume one course of action. In fact, they allow for changing course, for shifts, and for unexpected endings. The slow archives pivots around the register of decolonization as a processional move in centering indigenous temporalities, territorialities, and relationalities on their own, as well as the conversation with settler colonial logics and practices. Focusing on slow archives, because it seems to me that most of the time, more often than not, when I go to institutions and discuss what to do with Philippine collections. The tendency is to have this fast decision making process that somewhat always leads to digitization and the creation of web exhibits, so forth and so on. And I do think that we should start investing our time instead in the slower process of relationship building. So to conclude, a first step to decolonizing Philippine University collections is to prioritize the slow path of reparative actions to mitigate the repair or repair the harm of traditional curation representation and scholarship that has largely ignored community voices and perspectives. Glorified colonial actors and almost exclusively catered to academic researchers. In addition, the colonial work requires that we examine curation as a whole accounting for the whole spectrum of cultural heritage institutions from library from galleries, libraries, archives and museums or the glam sector, and not just collections and museums. In engaging Michigan's collections, I learned that Philippine items are dispersed across the multiple units of the university that have been historically siloed. Hence, we cannot decolonize museum objects without paying the same amount of attention to archives and library collections. Decolonization therefore demands that we see the discernible connections and relationships between communities, institutions, and collections. Thank you. Thank you so much for that very talking presentation and to respond to your lecture. We have Dr Christina Martinez one who is a senior teaching and research fellow. And the project hit for Philippines studies at SOS or PSS, an interdisciplinary forum for Philippine related teaching, research and cultural production in the UK. She is the principal investigator for mapping Philippine material culture and open access knowledge based at sources annotated knowledge from cultural originators in the Philippines and Southeast Asia. Without further ado, Dr Martinez one please. Thank you for having me. And thank you, Ricky, for giving us the low down on the Philippine collection at the University of Michigan. I didn't realize how big and also how dispersed the collection was, and how the school itself and its alumni are so complicit in American colonial expansion in the Philippines. I was intrigued by the fact that, aside from the infamous Dean Worcester and his obsession with the non Christian savages. There were other Michigan many, especially Carl equals I guess he's, he was the first director of the university's museum of anthropology. I was interested in him because, being from Cebu, I'm excited to see what he added to the university's collection, as it is sometimes rare to see objects in museums from the so called low land and Christianized areas, especially in the Visayas. So I can't wait to look more deeply into the entire collection. And so thank you for doing the survey and introducing us to your reconnect recollect project with its mission to produce reparative approaches to Philippine collections at the University of Michigan. For grounding your presentation with the reference to top and young's article decolonization is not a metaphor was very helpful. The provocative ideas they put forward on moves to innocence, which are basically diversions they call which relieve the colonizer from feelings of guilt, or responsibility and conceal the need to actually give up land or power or privilege. No, it's indeed crucial decolonizing benchmark. Sometimes there's a tendency to focus only on decolonizing the mind or making epistemological violence as a stand in, you know for the more uncomfortable task of relinquishing actual material capital, or indeed helping in making this kind of helps make decolonization as kind of a toothless signifier for many, or I guess as someone had put it decolonization has become a cliche. But I do appreciate the fact that you did not stop with talking young and recognize that there is no global answer to the question what is colonization. In fact, I think they some in some way contradict themselves when they say that colonialism can and must only be defined as settler colonialism, and so negating their kind of other proposition of a need to pay attention to the specific colonial apparatuses within a particular time and space. So, I guess I'm glad that you haven't given up on the term decolonizing yet, but instead offer real targeted strategies for upsetting the balances of power. Let me begin the discussion by posing a few questions to provoke further thought so I'm just, I just segmented some of my questions into kind of big tranches and you can feel free to discuss after I go through one point. So, at the core of your reparative strategy. There seems to be the foregrounding of the idea of reciprocity. So you talk about the need to address the lack of real and sustainable collections connections with Philippine communities in the US and the Philippines over the management and the representation of the collections materials. In your talk, you, you talked about repressor, reciprocity that to that envisions a relationship where power flows back and forth between parties, a relationship that is not extractive, and that we're both sides are mutually accountable to each other. But I guess, I guess, for me, we know that since the 1990s, and like with James Clifford's 1997 essay on the museum as a contact zone and maybe even Robin both 2011 influential critique on this. It seems to me that there has not been a lack of co curatorial endeavors and inclusionist programs in exhibitions. My question is, why do you think has there been little or no previous attempts at reciprocal custodianship in relation to the Philippine materials at the University of Michigan. I guess, was it a lack of curatorial interest and valuation coming from within the institution. I'm kind of familiar with this marginalization as I do think that more often than not the Philippines is always falls into the category of an orphaned collection. Both from within Southeast Asia, and from the more encyclopedic world of the museum in general you hardly ever see anything, any of the objects on display, or hardly ever have any exhibits not big exhibits on the Philippines. So, I am the segment with the question, how, how do you increase or do you agree that there is. There is a lack of curatorial interest, no, from from within the institutions, and how do you increase or how have you increased institutional interest in this marginalized collection. And I guess the other question is, should, should, should we be addressing this marginalization as and make it as one of the goals of a decolonizing agenda, kind of like the double marginalization of particular collections. Sorry, I was I was making notes because this is a wonderful question and indeed it's like, you know, a fascinating question, you know, why not, you know, you know, to give you a little bit more context here, you know, like the university has for decades, hosted Philippine scholars, you know, like, giving them there's even a specific scholarship for Filipinos to come and study at the university. There's one program for women, the barber scholarship, you know, for, and that expanded into Asian women, but it started as Filipinos, the pensionados, the early Filipinos scholars who studied in the U.S. So a lot of them went to Michigan. There's Michigan faculty, there's a sizable Philippine population in Ann Arbor and in the state of Michigan, and of course, you know, what in the United States I think Filipinos are the fourth largest immigrant population. So, you know, it's so the first thing I would say is like, you know, just the process of elimination. So it's not the lack of people. Right. It's, there are Filipinos within the structure of the university. We're not that many, but we're here. So there are Filipinos, there's Filipino community, right? So, and there are Filipinos who come to study the collection as Fulbright scholars. And as you know, given the extent of the collections, the Filipinos who come here study just about, you know, a whole range of what could be studied from snails to combat this male-born disease in the Philippines to, you know, looking at ceramics of the Gute collection that you mentioned earlier to, you know, studying the Worcester photographs on textile and weaving patterns, you know, people studying even, you know, history of the colonization itself, right? So, you know, so there's a lot of kind of academic access, but I do think that the missing part is, and you mentioned it earlier, despite, you know, models of, you know, like the contact zone and, you know, the the revisitation of that concept. And even like during, at the height of the implementation of NAGPRA, that, you know, returned objects and things like that, that also the creation of the Native American museum in Washington, D.C., with the Smithsonian, you know. So there's a whole lot of like kind of awakening around Native collections in the U.S. And, you know, the natural history museum here, for instance, had to retire its dioramas because of its depiction of Native Americans that associated them with, you know, like a backward and primitive cultures. And because also by sheer, the sheer fact that it's located in a natural history collection, which associated them with dinosaurs and all these things. So, there's a whole lot of, you know, context, it's like that. And your question is quite good, asking, so why not connect, you know. There's been multiple dialogues with Native American tribes in Michigan over its natural history collections, even at the Botanical Gardens, there's like the heirloom seeds that they have, that came from Native communities, already, you know, just that exchange of ideas happening between the institution and their collection. But not the Philippines, even though we're here. So I think partly the answer is like, as you said, it could be the lack of curatorial interest, especially, you know, in the past. Now I would say this project we're doing is possible because there is actually the curatorial interests now. But there's historically none. I think it's more like the idea was, you know, first, the siloing of these collections. It's still a prevalent now if you go to, so I'm dividing the collections into cultural and scientific, you know, so the cultural ones are the ones that are in the archives and, you know, Philippine history and the photographs and things like that. And then the scientific, this is kind of crude way of dividing them. The scientific ones are the, you know, the collections in natural history and the erbarium, where the approach to representation is scientific. And so it's, it actually makes the collection harder to access for communities because first you need to have some kind of scholarly and legitimate reason for doing so. And also, these collections have always been regarded as academic research collections. So for instance, most majority of the materials are considered research collections, they're not for exhibit. They're stored. So the university started building a museum. Actually, it started with the Guta collection, and then it expanded from there, you know, the expedition in the Philippines. And also, because of that created its anthropology department. But, you know, they've always seen these collections as something that they collected in the field, and then put them in storage. The students do research, their students did research, the students did research, other scholars did research, but they're not actually meant for exhibition. And that kind of kept the collection in these literally cabinets, in literal cabinets and hidden. They've always been, they've always positioned the collections as for historical and research kind of use. And I think it's that kind of framework that, and we also assume that if we invite Filipino scholars to access these collections that we are actually that's enough to access. But we all know that within the Philippine culture, there's also a kind of even divide between the elites and the academics and they don't necessarily travel back to the community and return the knowledge. So, you know, my roundabout way of explaining, it's complicated and there's a particular kind of dynamic. And then going back to the relational connections with the community. How do you navigate the differences in approaches and mindsets between the Filipinos in diaspora and Filipinos back in the Philippines. So you're trying to get their opinions and engage with them. Now, how do you navigate there? Because probably the IPs are, you know, their social economic status is very different. Their view of cultural memory inherited. So how do you, yeah, how do you consult and then kind of, yeah, because I think that's kind of very difficult to navigate. Yeah, wow, Tina, you're asking excellent questions. And then you're hitting the, you know, the, like the key points here. So I would say, first, I'd like to say that, you know, the Philippine community, both the diaspora and back home, it's not a monolithic community. I'll give you an example. We did a community consultation last summer, and ask members of the Ann Arbor community, so people living in this area, also in Detroit, because we're close to Detroit, and ask, what should we do with this collection? And the assumption is that the collection is harmful. And, you know, there are some who actually express that they don't perceive it to be harmful. In fact, that's just, you know, how things were in the past. And that it's, you know, how people collected scientifically, or how people did their work. So, you know, as far as they're concerned, there's really no harm done. But some disagreed, right, you know, and so we don't really have the same response. In years ago, I conducted, you know, like a series of focused discussions around Philippine items in American museums. And some, there's also an intergenerational perspective happening, and there's also, you know, like the immigration status, right, so meaning, you know, third generation Philippine Americans might have some kind of affinity, but you know, those baskets and textiles do not really represent me as an American, you know, kind of idea, right. And then for some Filipinos, they say, I don't want to see that because it's a reminder of what they say about us as savages, you know, and backwards. So, very complex and complicated. So, navigating those conversations is not easy. Also, like, for instance, you know, the people in charge of this project, me, myself and Deirdre de la Cruz and my other partners. You know, even if we're Filipinos, you know, when we go back to the Philippines, we're also considered settler in the eyes of indigenous Filipinos because we're not a part of a tribe, right. So, so yeah, like all that positionality and different perspectives, not easy, but I'm not giving up on the power of dialogue because it's actually helping institutions figure out, you know, a path forward. And that it's to invest more on that work. And because to me, the collection being separated from the communities is, you know, worse than us, I think debating about what to do with the collections. Yeah. And then, you know, like real terms of engagement with the community with regard to power and resource sharing. Some people think until the museum actually hires somebody and gives them a permanent long term job to work on the collection. I mean, in terms of like, how do you actually, how do you envision sharing power with these, you know, with these people that you dialogue with. Yeah, or even material resources, you know, times, because it's hard to, you know, because most of the time voluntary and then, you know, people come in and so how do you, how do you address this kind of. The power imbalance, right. Yeah, yeah, especially like what's unique about the Philippine situation, at least for now I'm not claiming that this will always be the case. There's really no active advocacy to repatriate the items. Yeah, right, you know that right. Yeah, right there's no. In fact, the attitude is more like, you know, I don't want those baskets and weaving back we have tons of them back home. And the other thing that I hear is that basically, well, you know, with climate change and all that you want to share those, yeah, those materials so that we can study our own, you know, scientifically studies that there's that and then. So, yeah, the, well, it depends on how we locate power in this particular situation, you know, it's, it's not like the situation for Native American human remains and sacred objects where there's real advocacy, right. And then to get them back as part of this, you know, claim to sovereignty and respect. And then also, and that's emanating from the cultures from the, you know, so I think what the first thing we should do is learn, given the, you know, the number of communities in the Philippines. We should actually do our due diligence and examine what are the terms for the communities, right. We have models. We never lack models in our field of how do we share, how do we digitize, how do we provide digital access and even create, you know, ways to interact with the collection. But, you know, going back to the community and seeing that that's tricky and we're still actually trying to figure out a way to do this. I know some people would easily give up and say this is an impossible task, right. You know, and I feel like, well, you know, it may not be in our lifetimes. Like, you know, like to me that we're playing with a different mode of temporality, I guess. Yeah. I like your idea of the slow, slow. And the reparative description and corrective actions on the language in the catalogs. Yeah. Do you have a mechanism for annotating the database? Yeah, so, so what's happening now is actually we're compiling. There are other universities doing reparative description, you know, like leading the way or actually Yale at the Yale collection. Harvard, but, you know, not necessarily for Philippine collections, but just, you know, for other marginalized or historically marginalized communities. So, you know, we're actually interested in the workflow because, because, you know, when at the end of the day, this is still relying on institutional work. So when you go to, when you talk to librarians, archivist curators and collections managers, you can't just say decolonize the collection. They show them like a kind of workflow. And normally it has to align with, depending on the field, like for librarianship, it has to align with the standards and guidelines for description of description. Right. If you don't, you know, show that, you know, like a way to circumvent those rules or exemptions, it's very hard to, you know, in fact, one pushback we heard is from, you know, a Filipino librarian who said, you know, they've spent decades to describe the Philippine material so they could be discoverable. And now you're telling me that I have to undo my description because I use the Library of Congress subject heading. And, you know, so you can't annotate Ricky. So right now, yeah, that's what we're looking at all the possibilities either add or maybe create like, you know, an extra layer, a metal layer into the description across the universities that says, because right now, you know, one problem is they're not integrated let's say the Goofy archaeological collections are at the Antro Museum, and the Goofy papers are at the Bentley Library, you know, they need to be brought together and make, you know, people realize that the archives in the museums are actually, while they're separate they are very much connected. Very much connected. So, so in terms of digital infrastructures and reparative description and all these actions, you know, we're looking at right now practical ways actually to implement and it may end up having a digital infrastructure. I know I've been really quite negative about, you know, jumping into that digital bandwagon immediately, but who knows, you know, to me is basically I want to listen and hear first and dialogue and talk to scholars like you and maybe in the audience to hear what's happening. I think for me, yeah, I think with the mapping, because of course we're learning all the time, as we keep adding to the inventory, but I guess it is kind of a superstructure in a way that we have more editorial control, because we link back to the items in the repository, but then we are able to have more mechanisms for enunciation from the community. I say we have control, editorial control, we annotate the entries, so we don't have to go through the mechanism of the library and the kind of their editorial policies and things. So I don't know if that in a way makes a kind of aggregated inventory a bit more manageable in terms of annotation or mechanisms for enunciation from the community. I don't know. Yeah. Sometimes, you know, we're faced with the realities and you know this, right, like for instance, some communities do not even have 24 hours of electricity, you know, so how can they annotate things, you know, it's difficult. No, but like with the mapping, we have workshops, for example, and then we gather, you know, and then I'm just talking more about the kind of the result of the workshops, it's easier to annotate a kind of free standing aggregation rather than the bad to go into the library system. Yeah, and individually, yeah, because they have rules and they have, yeah, so it's harder to. Systems don't necessarily talk to each other, like, you know, the museum will have its different database, whatever they use, and then the archive will have the finding aid and it could be not in a database but the published finding aid or digitized finding aid, which is you know, so, you know, like the infrastructure, I think, yeah, some will take the path of creating a kind of supra, what's the term? Yeah, that would become an umbrella for across. Yeah, yeah. But I guess that's kind of what we're doing with the mapping, no? But it was just too hard to. That's right, but how do you incorporate indigenous knowledge in that, you know. Oh, so we do a lot of in conversation. So we do a lot of workshops, so like we do, just recently we did the Tagbanua workshop, I think Sonya is here, from the Columbia. So it was actually really interesting, because these were people from all over, of course, Zoom, and then we transcribed and translated and everyone could just pitch in and then we had a product at the end and a paper and then we were able to annotate right away and to show, of course, it doesn't speak back immediately to the museum, where the object is stored, but at least we have this kind of, yeah, addition to the baseline, the baseline data. Yeah, I mean, I really believe in the dialogues. I mean, over the years, you know, you've heard people being critical of dialogues and they were tired of talking. But I say, you know, it depends on who's listening and, you know, and where, you know, whose perspectives you're privileging. Because even like the, you know, and a lot of museums are very open to that, you know, like a lot come to us to say how do we correct these sort of pan regional terms, kind of the idea of the moral and then Providence Research also they keep, you know, and I think it is a good foundation for, I don't know, for eventual repatriation if there is a need. Yeah, but more, as you were saying, which I agree very much with is there is a kind of focus on the colonial on the collector, you know, rather than And there is definitely a need to put in more details on, I guess, reversing the map also, no? Yeah, and like one time in one event I was accused of basically, you know, you're erasing history by changing the descriptive terms. I said, no, it's, we're not, that's not the recommendation. The suggestion is to, you know, well, for providential research, of course you want to know these people and, you know, so history of the item, you're not erasing that. You're just basically adding more terms that would help communities find themselves in your collection. Because, you know, as a good example is Wooster, unless you know who Wooster is and what he did in the Philippines, which tribal community he's been, you wouldn't know that he has items about your community, right, and, you know, magnify that into hundreds and thousands of collections. It's, and then for scientific collections, you know, when you front scientific, you know, naming and convention and it's less findable in the Philippines because we have local terms and names for certain things. I mean, it's not, this is not a surprise for museum workers, but I think the crux is basically on the implementation. So like the, I think the dismissing Philippine collections as like, oh, it's far, it's difficult, we don't have the money, we don't have the infrastructure and things like that. So, right now, like the goal of our project is to show model for doing this and say, you know, there's there's a path here, and it's a slow one, but let's do the first step. Yeah. I think we have questions. From the audience. Okay, great. Thanks so much, Ricky and Christina for the wonderful discussion I didn't really want to interrupt because you guys were kind of going to really And I know and we miss each other and this is our only opportunity to chat. So everyone learned a lot from your discussion and I mean I really appreciated that sort of focus on practice and implementation and you know I like how you can just show up at a museum or library and say like the colonize everything you actually have to get people like a workflow right. So, but yeah, I mean we have a couple of questions from the audience and I would like to, you know, encourage everyone else to please type of questions into the Q&A box. We still have about 20 minutes for questions. I just want to pose the first question that's asked by Almyra Gilles. It's Gilles. Hi Almy, we know Almy. So she's a research associate from the Field Museum and she says one of the encumbrances to the display of the Field Museum Philippine Ethnographic Collection they have 10,000 objects but only 20 hours display is actually financial so who's responsibility is it institutional and who's responsibility is it to find funding and is it a local diasporic community or global including Filipinos in the Philippines so I think that's kind of connected what you've been talking about. Yeah, like that financial aspect of this you know so I'll tell you what happened here at Michigan. You know, over the years, the academic community here has really been conscious about, you know, the existence of Philippine collections and the lack of infrastructures to connect them to communities and you know, and also the dark colonial history right. So when I was a PhD student here and then I left and and then came back as a professor, and then I, you know, with tenure and I think it was at that time, there's already other efforts to, you know, build the collection do exhibits. There's even protests from many years back on the natural history collections here. You know, like for us, you know, the timing is just ripe to go to the university and say, we want to do this, but we need funding. So the university has an arm called the humanities collaboratory, and the humanities collaboratory is, you know, under the office of the provost and they have a pot of money and we applied for, you know, support. So in this instance, it's actually the university that provided the funding. Of course, it also relied on the willingness of the scholars here the Filipino scholars to work. Because we asked, we also think that it has to be led by people from the community, and the scholars from the Philippines who are here because we are here. So there's also that, you know, effort. Maybe at some point, going back to Almi's question about so who's responsibility. That's a complex and hard question to answer in the sense that, you know, the reality of Michigan is, you know, different, you know, it's a university institution. And there's the whole anti racist rhetoric is really, you know, as a university really open here. Once a scholar like me and Deirdre go to university and say, you know, we need to dismantle, you know, the racist practices that we have here. There's a tendency to work with us, you know, and, you know, with, you know, willingness to do that, which I do not know and I'm not certain if it's, you know, the same for institutions. I'm not saying that the field museum is one of those that this is the difficult because I know some of the curators and people like Almi they are doing great work and they actually have inspired me with, you know, the co curation concept. But, you know, right now we're saying, well, other than co curation, there should be counter curation as well from the community, you know, like the kind of resistance it's not always harmonious, you know, sometimes you have to counter. And all of those models, I think for a university like this. We're also excited around, you know, the possibilities of this of rethinking, you know, new frameworks and new ideas, you know, so for us, the funding comes from the university and, you know, through the efforts of the scholars in this university. I know in Chicago, there's a big Filipino population. There's a consulate there. So potentially, but I don't know if Filipinos at this stage are willing to, you know, provide funding and money. I have a, I know of another effort, another, I'm not going to name the group, but another, you know, Asian population and they are having a hard time soliciting donation to support the project because there's just not a culture of giving to institutions in the same way that many cultures have a kind of philanthropic spirit that I will give you an endowment of this much. You know, I don't know, I'm maybe over generalizing, but it's really hard for me to find Filipinos to open their pocketbooks and donate. So like right now, we're going the route of the institution supporting this. But you know, I'll be here in Chicago, there's probably a lot of entrepreneurs there. So I have to say though that Jamie Kelly gave us permission to use the entire database of the 10K collection, including the IRS photos and catalogs to add to the inventory, the mapping. So I know there are limitations to digital, to kind of a digital kind of museum in some sense. But I guess for me it's always better to just have that type of access, and then work on that access by by connecting it. And that leads to even digital repatriation. I think Ikin is here and she's so very very successful with with bringing these high resolution photos of textiles and bringing it to the weaving community in the cordilleras and they're able and using a digital to be able to revitalize the textile industry because that's what the specific community wanted. They wanted to see these old designs, 150 year old designs preserved in museums. So in some sense, because of this, you know, it's kind of, I guess it's not a slow way to deal with it Ricky, but because you know you in a way you dump the colonial into as a baseline in this in this huge inventory. But yet, I think there are ways also to manage it so that it becomes more, you know, it can intervene in some ways so you can make sure that you actually put mechanisms for intervention. You know, listen, for me is like, I think we benefit from the diversity of approaches. You know, we have different approaches but at the end of the day I'm not I don't see myself in competition with any projects happening. In fact, I do think that it's a particular ecology that sometimes maybe things should happen simultaneously, the fast and the slow. You know, because I do think that, you know, I mean like, I'm Eakin is doing amazing work, you know, bringing collections I know that she's just for the Worcester photographs here she's done photoidicitation in places that physically I cannot go, you know, and you know, all those ties and connections. So, you know, and even the National Museum of the Philippines once used some images of Worcester from the American Museum of Natural History in New York, you know, getting high resolution copies from there for their exhibit so there's there are those kinds of exchanges that I think are good that facilitated digitally, right, because it's, it's one, one notion of repatriation that I'm very fascinated with is not that of like actual return but, you know, knowledge repatriation you actually repatriate knowledge because sometimes it's not really the object that people are seeking. It's the knowledge embedded in those objects and sometimes digitization could facilitate many of those. You know, so we do have examples of, you know, actual repatriation of objects in the Philippines right and but a lot of those are very like symbolic, you know, like the Balangiga bells it's like stolen by the American soldiers, returning has some kind of meaning, you know, nationally. But most of the time the majority of the collections in museums and archives and libraries here are more like, I would say falling under the rubric of, you know, knowledge repatriation. Give them the knowledge, give them knowledge about, you know, how traditions and rituals are performed, knowledge about land knowledge about, you know, natural resources and things like that so that people are informed so that they know, you know, both the cultural and scientific knowledge that they actually have that are embedded in these collections so I think you know there's a whole lot of exciting work to be done around knowledge repatriation. Yeah. And, well, I guess, with digital repatriation, the idea, the cost factor is very minimal in some sense, you know, and that's another, that's another, you know, and then of course the preservation of the material. Of course there's no aura of the actual thing but if it was indeed knowledge repatriation. There are ways even now technologically. There's a lot now of computational tools that you can use with digital repatriation you can use an AI and look at emerging patterns for kind of diasporic objects and then once they're aggregated you can see stylistic patterns you can see kind of diffusion of, I don't know, not really diffusion but even connections with Southeast Asia when you begin to aggregate the whole thing in one. So, yeah, in terms of knowledge repatriation I do think. Sometimes, you know, I like the term knowledge repatriation rather than digital repatriation because when you say digital repatriation you're focusing on the medium. But the solution is not really the medium it's through the, you know, access to knowledge. And also, I've kind of, I've been reading a whole lot about digital repatriation and I do embrace some of the critique that say it's not repatriation where they're only giving back copies. So but I say but there's a lot of power in those copies because they have knowledge embedded in them. So why don't we just be more accurate and say this is knowledge repatriation. That's a very good point actually. So yeah, kind of seems with this question of repatriation is really dependent on what the community wants and needs. Thanks so much for kind of complicating that question a little more. I just want to take another question. We have 10 minutes left for today's session. Thank you so much. And she thanks Dr Ricardo for the interesting introduction and also for your critique of the term, the colonization and introducing us to the story of the Michigan man and histories of clicking at the, at the university. And she appreciates your emphasis on building community relations and wonders, are there any models for you and your team beyond the Native American experiences which of course, I guess it's the most natural to turn to given your location in the US. Are there any other models for you that you follow. And also other, you know, similarly large other similarly large Filipino collections outside the Philippines and how do they do you know how they engage with the goals to be colonized. Yeah, so yeah, I would say stay tuned, because you know, like our project is a three year project we only started in September we did a series of conversations in the summer summer here is basically May, June, July, August. And then after that we got two year funding beginning September to actually create the model. So what we're doing is basically, let's try some activities and programs and see how it will work for us and create like a kind of toolkit that others could see because we know and conscious of the fact that we are not the only university with large Philippine collections Harvard has a Philippine collection. I know Berkeley. I don't if you're watching the news Berkeley. There's a lot of currently happening a protest in Berkeley about you know the treatment of Philippine collections there. I know Cornell has Philippine materials, Yale and prison basically like big universities right and and museum, the pen museum also yeah because I've done research there and then of course you know field museum, you know non university based. The American Museum of Natural History the Smithsonian. It's largest Asian collection is actually Philippines. Why, because we were a colony right so we really need models and this is what I'm saying you know we need to create those models. And while saying this may not apply for just about every institution, but let we'll show you how we're doing it and then so one of the things that were, we have different kind of points one is reparative description like how do we fix the right that's one. Another is how do we engage communities, you know we've been doing all the series of dialogues we had dialogue by going to like the Philippine Center in Detroit for instance, we want to do more of that. But one is to open the collection and do what we call the the reconnect lab which is patterned after you know if you Google museums lab you'll see many models of museums lab but we call it reconnect lab where you, you bring objects, and then around the object you create like dialogues for people to you know, talk. So the problem right now is our location, you know, it's almost impossible plus COVID to bring Filipinos we have a we're planning to bring indigenous Filipinos here but you know as you know number one visa restrictions are to COVID and availability, you know so, but if we choose to we have funding for that, but we're saying oh, we have to wait. Yeah, and so that's why you know we cannot make decisions and say this is how you do it we want to test them. We also have an artist series where we want to bring diverse artists to interact with the collection. We opened up, you know, the catalogs to artists and say, What can you make of it, you know, what will you make but there's no pressure to make something but for them to interact with the collection and see if they do something you know so that we have an artist series. And then of course, there's a pedagogy around this that the university is really interested like involving the students like how do you really do reparative and decolonial work. It's not just it's not sustainable if it's the same people over and over right you know so we are we're working with students across universities of different levels undergrad to all the way up to the PhD. And you know, it does make me so busy with all of these things but you know it's it's the kind of hard work that I really like so to answer the question we are building the model. And with the caveat that you know this this works for us here in Michigan maybe you can emulate some of it or be inspired by some of it and maybe it will work. And, and yeah but the thing is you know I wouldn't discount too much the progress in Native American collections because you know a lot of the issues are resonating with us. Some of the arguments could very well be applied to Philippine collection. But you know the thing is we need to sit down and like see how they apply really to us. I'm extremely grateful because in a sense you know they made institutions more open to these kinds of work. So, the term I use is I build I build from the Native American models that are out there. Christina do you have anything to add on your work with mapping material culture Philippine material culture and how you know what kinds of models have you been following in your work in my work. Well, there's a, I don't know, people might accuse me of being too theoretical but hey you know I'm an academic. So I could I could put it in the chat later on but there's a work by Sharon McDonald it's a co-authored piece called other whicing. And maybe somebody could quickly Google that if you put Sharon McDonald otherwise and you'll see the PDF of that work. And you know Sharon McDonald is for you know like the museum studies scholars here probably is quite familiar you know she's done a lot of work or thinking around museums. But she was particularly looking at anthropological collections and how do how do we think otherwise you know other ways of doing things and and that actually was enough to inspire me so yeah, how do we perform other whicing in this collection how do we do things otherwise when we know it's not working. There's you know it's very liberating to see to see that you know argument you know like the one I cited earlier slow archives by Kim Kristen and Jane Anderson. Also, you know, advocating for the slow process not jump immediately into you know big projects that you think will be high yield but create and form relationships. That's another one. You know, I've been, you know, like that. My experience when I was still a student and I was invited at the field museum and then they did the co curation event in there. That one was amazing, you know, bringing community members together I was there I was very touching. Mira brought me actually and John, the wealth curator. So there's, there are things that are in practice that informed me over the years, my own scholarship in virtual reunification and digital repatriation. I'm, I'm actually not against digitization I'm more nuanced about it having studied, you know, what that what the process could actually achieve and also the limitations. Particularly in the limitations for communities. So, yeah, but you know, the models I'm talking about they will not give you like one size fits all like map or guidelines that they say if you do step one two and three then you'll see your set. I think the slow archives movement and the other rising movement. These are people who tend to think with communities. Think through the processes, do the dialogue, and then start working slowly. To that specificity that you are talking about mentioning on there as well. Yeah, I mean, if you examine the history of these institutions it took them decades, if not centuries to build the collection, we cannot undo those structures in 10 years, I think. I'm I'm prepared to take this project beyond, you know, be on my lifetime and that's why I believe in mentoring students and young students, because I do think that it will continue until, until we're all gone, and because it took the same amount of time to create this collection. They will probably take generations to kind of, you know, do this work. But Christina, we only have a couple of minutes remaining. Christina, do you have anything to add to this any final sort of thoughts. Yeah, I do really agree with Ricky, no. Now, there's no point in in access, if, if, if you define access as just mere data on, on, you know, in not really connecting to the, but connecting to the cultural or originators and the communities who actually own the cultural property I guess but I guess there's also something to be said about aggregate go putting the data out there. baseline data so that you already get access and then work from there in terms of, of connecting to the community so, so you have something in some sense already. So yeah, again that's a different model in some sense but I think the ultimate goal is really allow to empower another cultural originators to have a say to enunciate to own this, this, this cultural, this cultural heritage, I guess that they have. Thanks so much. Well, so with that, I think I need to kind of bring the session to a close. We don't want to thank, you know, Dr. Benzalan and Dr. Martinez one for your really rich and productive discussion today. I mean, you know, I've also learned a lot and I think gives me a lot, a lot to think about for my own kind of curatorial work at the ACM in Singapore. And also to thank our audience for your for your time and attention and for all your questions. So, you know, once again, remember to sign up for the final webinar and our decolonizing curating the museum and Southeast Asia series next week, the same time. And yeah, to those who celebrate today's actually the body, so you know, happy to be probably happy to Wally, everyone all over the world. And yeah, with that, I'll bring this session to a close. Thank you everyone. Thank you.