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Blackfoot morning dew11/27/2023 In Canada, repatriation has been recommended by the Assembly of First Nations, the Canadian Museum Association, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), but there is no federal law. Since then, hundreds of thousands of repatriations have occurred, allowing for respectful treatment of ancestors and re-connections to spiritual, communal practice and ceremony. In 1990, the US passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), requiring the repatriation of ancestral remains, funerary, and sacred objects from museums to source communities. In this chapter we examine some of these issues in relation to the Blackfoot Shirts Project, an international collaboration between the Pitt Rivers Museum (PRM), However, such work raises a number of particularly difficult issues, involving as it does the logistical challenges of work sometimes conducted overseas and in relatively remote communities, and the political challenges of negotiating different agendas and sets of authority. " Social agency " in museum outreach work with ethnographic collections is an important goal, given the needs for access to heritage objects by indigenous peoples in order to strengthen identity and maintain distinct cultures. We have long championed a collaborative model of museum praxis which recognizes community authority and expertise and serves community goals as much as museum ones (Peers and Brown, 2003 Brown et al., 2006). These tensions can place staff and participants in these projects in frustrating positions: even when both parties want to work in this new way, it can be difficult. Museum staff who engage in social agency work also find themselves mediating between their professional responsibilities, institutional expectations, and the needs and expectations of the groups with whom they work. Wherever this work occurs, the processes of engaging in social agency and mediation challenge museums and their staff at all levels, from training to policies about working with museum objects to what the museum building, its spaces, and security systems will permit in terms of activities. Some of this mediation occurs within the walls of museums, in traditional exhibition spaces and meeting rooms other forms involve museum collections but occur outside, in locations as diverse as community centers, prisons, and hospitals (Pye, 2008). Over the past two decades, Eilean Hooper-Greenhill's (1992) claim that the primary commodity of museums is the production of knowledge has been tempered by an emerging function of social mediation.
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