Introduction

The longstanding calls for museums to practise accountability, inclusion, restitution, and equitable access have grown into critical decolonial demands over the last two decades, and particularly since the 2012 publication of Amy Lonetree's book Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums. Community members, practitioners, and scholars are collectively elevating the inherent need for museums to redress colonial harm and shift their operating practices from the colonial to the decolonial. However, many museums remain resistant to this much needed and imperative change. Why is that? Perhaps it's because change is difficult – it's uncomfortable, fluid, uncertain, and scary, especially if you have operated and been trained under the colonial constructs of ‘industry best practices’, which have reified your organisation's status as an ‘authoritative expert’ since its inception.

The ‘museum’ was established in order to support, legitimise, and celebrate the colonial endeavour. Museums grew from the European ‘cabinets of curiosity’, where the colonial elite would display their trophies of conquest in order to establish racial superiority and further justify the right to colonise. Much like today, in museums the objects, textiles, plants, animals, ancestral human remains, and animal skeletal remains were used to tell a story that the collector curated to match their interpretive plan, ethos, and worldviews (Bennett, 1995; Aldrich, 2009).

We recognise this barbarous past, acknowledge that colonialism continues to manifest in museums today, and thus ask ourselves the profound question: Can an inherently colonial museum be decolonial? Our answer is that we don't know, but we must try. Maya Angelou, American poet and civil rights activist, talks about how someone can only do the best they can until they know better, and that once they know better, they must also then do better. We agree with Angelou both on a personal and on an institutional level. We recognise that museums continue to actively perpetrate colonial harm towards Black, Indigenous, and Peoples of Colour (BIPOC) internationally. With a deep systemic colonial legacy, the Museum of Us, where we both work, is no different, and now it is our responsibility as senior museum practitioners (in key leadership positions), community members, and as humans to do better to redress this colonial harm.

In recognition of all of this, we hold on to the call for decolonial change and the need to do better as museum practitioners.