The following short articles were presented at a special session of the Pacific Arts Association, held at the College Arts Association annual meeting in New York in February 2007. Entitled “Cultural Properties—Reconnecting Pacific Arts,” the panel brought together curators and anthropologists working in the Pacific, and with Pacific collections elsewhere, with the intention of presenting a series of case studies evoking the discourse around cultural property that has emerged within this institutional, social, and material framework. The panel was conceived in direct response to the ways that cultural property, specifically in relation to museum collections, has been discussed recently in major metropolitan art museums such as the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met). This prevailing cultural property discourse tends to use antiquities—that most ancient, valuable, and malleable of material culture, defined categorically by the very distancing of time that in turn becomes a primary justification for their circulation on the market or the covetous evocation of national identity—as a baseline for discussion of broader issues around national patrimony and ownership.

Within this article I discuss the productive potentials of looking at historic photographs of the Purari Delta with indigenous communities today. A particular type of artifact, the meanings of photographs are promiscuous. Thinking about the shape of cultural property relations that are manifest photographs, I show how engagements with indigenous communities unsettles European preconceptions about what photographs are as well as how doing so raises issues about what cultural property is, and perhaps can be. Instead of being a discreet entity, cultural property for the I'ai emerges as a network of relationships that envelopes people, environment, and ancestors. This expansive notion of cultural property can help us rethink how we treat and handle objects within museums and archives.

Objects were and still are pivotal in configuring intertribal relationships; and equally, they played a crucial role in negotiating the borders between early colonial situations and Māori, the indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand. This article explores the notion of object efficacy through discussing further relational values such as place, oral and written histories, visionary leadership, and political and culturally defined imperatives, particularly as they contribute to reviving an object's embedded knowledge, in this case the entangled agencies of taonga.

Debates around cultural properties tend to focus on law and ethics, on appropriation and ownership, with media representations often producing stereotypes that reinforce and polarize the terms of the debate. The common, typically polemical, notion is that rapacious museums are merely a final resting point for captive static objects, with repatriation viewed as simply restorative compensation. A robust challenge to this view was developed in the Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums signed in 2002 by the directors of 19 leading museums in Europe and North America. The concept of the universal museum asserts that objects are cared for and held in trust for the world, overriding shifting political and ethnic boundaries and enabling the visitor to see “different parts of the world as indissolubly linked.” Although many would be in sympathy with the rhetorical position asserted, critics have argued that the declaration is a thinly veiled attempt to bolster immunity to repatriation claims. On both sides of the debate, the hegemonic position of many museums remains unsettling.

The images presented document aspects of progress and growth for a significant wetland and coastal restoration project taking place at Kuku, Horowhenua, southwest coast of North Island, Aotearoa, New Zealand. The work is undertaken by representatives from various hapū known as Ngäti Te Rangitäwhia, Te Mateawa, Ngäti Manu, and Ngäti Kapumanawawhiti ki Kuku, who are affiliates of a larger tribal group, or iwi, Ngäti Tükorehe. The research project (undertaken while working as senior curator Mätauranga Mäori at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington) links cultural landscape issues and activities to the concerns for cultural property as revered taonga with special qualities within museum collections. The term taonga is relevant to understanding culturally venerated items within museum holdings while honoring their associated peoples, tribal lands, and waterways from where they derive. As significant cultural material, taonga are valued because of their associations. Cultural landscapes are also well regarded as land-, sea-, and water-based taonga—an encompassing term that denotes their intrinsic value and intricate natural, cultural, and spiritual interrelationships. As museum professionals rethink cultural property issues in different ways, the academic research has also embraced the concept of land- and water-based taonga to bolster ecological, cultural, and spiritual contexts that persist in ancestral lands in tribal tenure.

Over the last 20 years, museums have attracted unprecedented academic attention. For the first time in their history, museums as institutions have been the subject of theorizing as well as intense academic and public debates about their place in the contemporary world. Much of the theoretical work has taken place in the context of the New Museology, a critical goal of which has been to rethink the manifold and complex relationships between museums and the societies in which they exist. Advocates of the New Museology have prominently sought ways to make museums less elitist but more inclusive, that is more directly and democratically involved with their various constituencies such as the people who create and use the objects that museums collect or the audiences who visit museum exhibitions and participate in museum programs. Unfortunately, the New Museology has been rather long on theory and rather short on detailed explorations or accounts of the implications of its theoretical formulations for museum practice, that is for the day-to-day activities and interactions comprising the work that goes on in and around museums.

The mounting loss of the traditional knowledge of indigenous peoples presents environmental as well as ethical issues. Fundamental among these is the sustainability of indigenous societies and their ecosystems. Although the commercial expropriation of traditional knowledge grows, rooted in a global, corporate application of intellectual property rights (IPRs), the survival of indigenous societies becomes more problematic. One reason for this is an unresolved conflict between two perspectives. In the modernist view, traditional knowledge is a tool to use (or discard) for the development of indigenous society, and therefore it must be subordinated to Western science. Alternatively, in the postmodernist view, it is harmonious with nature, providing a new paradigm for human ecology, and must be preserved intact. We argue that this encumbering polarization can be allayed by shifting from a dualism of traditional and scientific knowledge to an assemblage of local knowledge, which is constituted by the interaction of both in a third space. We argue that IPR can be reconfigured to become the framework for creating such a third space.

In October 2007, the mayor of the French city of Rouen agreed to return to New Zealand a preserved tattooed head of a Maori warrior (called toi moko by Maori) from that city's Museum of Natural History, whose collection the head had been part of since 1875. The decision to return the head was based on an initiative by the Museum of New Zealand (Te Papa Tongarewa), which has successfully secured the return of other such heads from museums in various European countries and the United States. Before the Rouen head could be handed over, however, the French Ministry of Culture intervened, arguing that its return was unauthorized under French law as being part of a French museum collection and thus inalienable.