The specter of empire haunts European museums. The correlation between museological collecting and imperial ideology is now widely taken for granted in academic circles, but the question of what is to be done with and in western museums that hold colonial collections persists. This essay takes one small Māori hei tiki (RCIN 69263) from the Royal Collection as a case study to understand what the decolonization of imperial collections might look like. To date, RCIN 69263 has been labeled as a gift from the Māori to Captain James Cook and then from Cook to King George III. Using a range of manuscript sources from Cook’s crew onboard the Endeavour, innovative Māori sources, and traditional Māori crafting technologies to “listen” to the hei tiki, this essay uncovers a new story for RCIN 69263. Accepting that colonial objects can still “speak” in pre-museological epistemes allows us to re-write the museum label for this single object, correcting errors that were inscribed upon it by empire and the carelessness of imperial collecting. Moreover, “listening” to this particular colonial object offers insights into the broader history of the indigenous Pacific that Europeans both missed and misunderstood in the eighteenth century. This case study, thus, promises to rectify the specific narrative damage perpetrated on RCIN 69263 by flawed (even fabricated) museum labels even as it offers a roadmap for the bigger project of decolonizing colonial museums more generally.

Tillman Nechtman is a professor of history at Skidmore College. He is the author of two books, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain and The Pretender of Pitcairn Island, both published with Cambridge University Press.

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