The Unstoppable Wave of Museum Decolonization
The decolonization of museums is an unstoppable global process. For years, academics and countries that suffered colonial violence have demanded a more truthful reading of museum collections and, in some cases, the restitution of their cultural heritage held in museums—and their storage rooms—across Europe and the United States. Following this trend, Spain also sought to join the wave of museum decolonization. Last year, the Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, called for “reviews of collections to overcome the colonial framework.” In the case of the Canary Islands, this practice reveals a series of particularities deeply connected to its own historical process.
The Complex Task of Decolonizing a Museum
Decolonizing museums is no simple task. One of the most impactful measures is the restitution of artifacts obtained through looting during colonization. However, many experts express doubts, as tracing how these items were acquired and determining who they should be returned to today is often complicated. The process also includes contextualizing objects, explaining their origin, their use in their culture of origin, and how they ended up in a museum display case.
In the Canary Islands, the debate over restitution and the future use of human remains of the ancient Canarians intensified with the withdrawal and claim of the Erques mummy, now stored in the National Archaeological Museum. Simultaneously, museums like the Museum of Nature and Archaeology of Tenerife (MUNA) safeguard archaeological materials from Western Sahara, donated by José Héctor Vázquez, the first governor of that territory during the Spanish colonization.
A Necessary and Urgent Process for the Islands
For Roberto Gil, a sociologist and doctor of Philosophy, Culture and Society from the University of La Laguna (ULL), this decolonization is necessary. He details that in numerous museums, “goods and human remains obtained from looting, dispossession, and colonial violence are still displayed uncritically,” against which their restitution and the “end of the public display of indigenous bodies” is demanded.
Along the same lines, Doctor of Philosophy from ULL Larisa Pérez Flores believes that although this is a reality affecting all museums, in the Islands, “in a specific way, it also becomes urgent.” For the philosopher, this particularity is related to the conquest itself, which has given the Islands “a historical relationship with direct colonial expansion.”
“The Canary Islands is a territory that five centuries ago began to have a rather violent interaction with another way of organizing society and producing knowledge. This became established over the centuries and produced a specific vision of our own territory,” she emphasizes.
A Dual Colonial Identity
This different way of understanding the world, according to Pérez Flores, materializes in the fact that the contents of Canarian history or archaeology museums are related to the way “other people” have looked at the Islands. “These categories were created from specific frameworks, with specific interests, which may not be the ones that correspond to our territory,” she clarifies.
“The colonial identity of the Canary Islands is somewhat about being both the colonizer and the colonized,” reveals José Otero, Doctor of Arts and Humanities from ULL. Similarly, Claire Laguian, Professor of Cultural Studies at Paris 8 University, who has researched the invisibility of slavery in Canarian museums, maintains that the position of the Islands is very complex in the global system: “The Canary Islands are caught between opposing sociocultural and geopolitical tensions: between the African continent, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, and within the Spanish state.”
Pérez Flores explains that “the double coloniality in the Canary Islands is very evident,” as it is a geographical space that recreates coloniality over other African territories, while simultaneously, the islands are seen as “something exotic from which to extract things without permission.” For all these reasons, the decolonization of museums in the Islands might indicate that it should follow its own path: “We are beginning to address these issues, and it’s true that doing so by following formulas that are not what our context demands can be dangerous,” argues Otero.
How to Decolonize a Museum in the Canary Islands?
For Roberto Gil, the first step would be to identify “how racism has infiltrated the museums.” From there, the perspectives that have shaped the narratives about the history of the Canary Islands could be revised. He highlights several problematic narratives: “The one that denies the violence of colonization by representing it as an idyllic process of mestizaje; the one that still differentiates the indigenous population by racial types; the one that continues to project sexist stereotypes that make native women and their importance to the social order invisible; the one that overemphasizes certain traits of precolonial culture, such as their injuries and diseases, but barely attends to others, like their ways of producing knowledge; and the exhibition of their bodies as if they were mere scientific curiosities.”
For Claire Laguian, it is also important to ask what is being taught and what is not, adding that the public should be given the opportunity to learn about colonial history as it actually happened.
According to Larisa Pérez Flores, the construction of a decolonized museum should be the result of social dialogue involving different social agents: “It cannot be an entity that is somehow monopolized only by a group of experts belonging to the scientific or academic community making decisions about it,” she advocates.
The Inherently Problematic Nature of Museums
In any case, the philosopher also stresses that this is a complex task, since the very origins of the museum are problematic because the institution “was born as something linked to power, to certain elites who had the capacity to accumulate goods.” Furthermore, she clarifies that these objects were ripped from their contexts to be placed in other spaces: “That object loses the use it had in its original context and ends up being re-signified in another for certain people to observe. And when you observe the object, many things are lost. Even dignity can be lost. For example, burying a person can be a way of preserving dignity, and exhibiting them can be a way of losing it.”
Museums in the Canary Islands in a State of Reflection
One of the museum spaces undergoing review is the Casa de Colón in Gran Canaria, a place that recreates the navigator’s voyage to America, which led to what is considered the first globalization in history. Its director, Carmen Gloria Rodríguez, states that it is “necessary to change the narratives” to move beyond that “Eurocentric gaze.”
She notes that in the tour a visitor takes upon arriving at the house museum, which starts in the admiral’s cabin and with paintings of the Catholic Monarchs, for example, a Taíno (the original population on the first Caribbean island encountered by Columbus’s expedition) is not named. “A world was not discovered; a route for navigation was discovered. A territory was not discovered; that territory was already there. From that moment on, the world would never be the same. It is that first globalization that would change everything,” she emphasizes.
The museum has begun contacts with other institutions, such as the Museum of America, to work on the transfer of pieces to articulate this change in discourse, and has held the debate forum ‘Diálogos. De museos y ontologías’ with the intention of reflecting on the new perspectives suggested around decolonization.
El Museo Canario, located in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, is another space that acknowledges the unstoppable wave of museum decolonization. “It is necessary for all museums to confront a reflection on how they configured their collections, the origin of those pieces, and the participation of the communities from the places of origin of those pieces,” maintains its director, Daniel Pérez Estévez.
In this vein, he points out that in management, activities, and focus, they seek a revision of their narratives, to which the question of gender is also implemented to “give a priority role to the indigenous woman as the protagonist of her time.”
The Debate Over Human Remains
The most photographed room in this museum is where the skulls and mummies of ancient Canarians are exhibited, and there is a debate about their appropriateness. “In the case of El Museo Canario, there is a differentiating particularity. While in the museums of colonial countries, indigenous people were treated as exotic objects of study, in this case, the founders themselves placed the Canarian indigenous population at the center as protagonist subjects,” he clarifies.
This newspaper contacted the Tenerife Cabildo on several occasions to include the position of the Museum of Nature and Archaeology of Tenerife (MUNA) on museum decolonization and received no response.
A Public and Long-Term Debate
The exhibition of human remains of the ancient Canarians is one of the most controversial topics in the generation of new decolonial narratives. José Otero, who has conducted research on the skull room of El Museo Canario, encourages the opening of a public and long-term debate on this issue.
“On one hand, in El Museo Canario we have this museological rarity, this way of exhibiting human remains of people who were murdered, of what was an ethnocide in the Canary Islands. On the other hand, I try to delve into some kind of solution that is not a copy and paste of what has been done in other types of colonial situations,” he says. He is not initially in favor of dismantling the museum, but rather proposes that this space become “a museum that investigates itself, that investigates its foundational roots.”
For his part, Daniel Pérez Estévez defends that this room is like “a museum within a museum,” preserved as it was at the moment of its founding with the aim of understanding what anthropology was like at that time: “It is a room that invites reflection from the visiting public, both about the aboriginal population and about the history of science itself,” he highlights.
The Invisible History of Slavery
Canarian museums, framed within the colonial narrative, may have left behind certain relevant episodes in the history of the Islands. One of them is the trade and exploitation of African people for enslavement. Claire Laguian conducted research on the invisibility of this theme in 49 museums in the Canary Islands in 2020 and 2021.
The researcher concluded that none of them had a room dedicated to this period of slavery and that only three of them made a slight mention, sometimes using euphemisms. She recalls that in the 16th century, 25% of the population of La Laguna was Black: “It would be important to convey this history, because the Canarian population is the result of mestizaje, but a mestizaje that was not always the fruit of alliances of love, but rather of power relations. One of the obstacles today is that discovering themselves as African or descendants of Sub-Saharan people can be uncomfortable for many, due to unthought or internalized coloniality, and this is also seen in the narratives of the museums,” she emphasizes.
Laguian points to some of the Flemish altarpieces exhibited in the Canary Islands as an example of how a decolonial narrative could be constructed in museums by telling the weight that slavery had in the construction of the territory and Canarian identity: “If it is explained that this painting arrived in the Islands thanks to the patronage of sugar cane merchants, it could be added that some families in the Islands became rich in this sector, which in most cases involved having Moorish and/or Sub-Saharan slaves,” she stresses.
Confronting the Past to Understand the Future
“We are avoiding topics because they make us uncomfortable or we don’t know how to address them,” summarizes Laguian. In her opinion, the concealment of slavery is related to coloniality: “The internalized hierarchies that Western thought has produced make it difficult for us to see the extent of the violence within coloniality.”
In this sense, she believes the way forward is to overcome the framework of guilt, which does not allow for progress: “It is about confronting the past to be able to understand where we come from and where we are going,” she concludes.
