Written by Tzu-Ning Li
Image credit: “Waiting for a Century: The Return of Qimei Cultural Artefacts to Qimei” special exhibition, co-curated by the National Taiwan Museum and the Qimei Cultural Museum of Qumei Community in Ruisui Township, Hualien County, 2009. Photo courtesy of Tzu-Ning Li.
Returning Objects, Returning Relationships
When I first began working on Indigenous collaborative exhibitions at the National Taiwan Museum in the late 2000s, I did not yet have the vocabulary to describe what we were doing. Over the following years, our museum collaborated with Indigenous communities and local museums representing six Indigenous peoples across Taiwan — including Amis, Atayal, Paiwan, Saisiyat, Bunun, and Rukai communities — and co-organised eight “objects returning home” exhibitions in places such as Cimei, Datong, Wutai, Haiduan, and Xiangtianhu. An overview of these collaborations can be found in a recent Chinese-language review article “A Review and Reflection on the Collaborative Exhibition Projects between the National Taiwan Museum and Indigenous Local Cultural Museums over the Years” (〈國立臺灣博物館與原住民族地方文化館歷年合作策展的回顧與反思〉) by Meng-Fan Lu (2025) on exploring the historical context of collaborating with the National Taiwan Museum and Indigenous local museums in Taiwan.
At the time, these projects often felt improvised, uncertain, and experimental. We struggled with transportation, conservation requirements, community expectations, bureaucratic negotiations, and sometimes completely different understandings of what a museum object even was. Yet looking back now, these experiences seem like a lived commentary on many of the key ideas that have shaped museum discourse in the twenty-first century: engagement, collaboration, contact zones, co-curation, reciprocity, dialogue, decolonisation, and the so-called “engagement turn” in museum anthropology.
What appeared in academic theory as abstract concepts became, for me, a long process of practice, trial and error, adjustment, reflection, and learning.
When Museum Objects Speak Again
Beyond theory, what remains most vivid in my memory are not the highlight moments, such as exhibition openings attended by officials, scholars, and photographers. Instead, what I remember most vividly are those small but emotionally charged moments in which museum objects suddenly became active again in people’s actions.
I remember Amis elders at the museum storage immediately recognising rare age-grade headdresses that their communities had not seen for generations. I remember Atayal hunters carefully and reverently unsheathing a headhunting knife preserved in the museum’s collection, its blade still attached by strands of human hair. I remember a Bunun priestess turning visibly uneasy during the closing ceremony as ancestral objects were prepared for their return to Taipei. I remember a Paiwan female chieftain proudly pointing to a carved box bearing her family emblems, recounting its lineage to younger community members. And I remember Rukai young men slowly carrying a massive ancestral spirit post uphill, step by step, as they brought it home to their community’s museum.
Image credit: Rukai young men carrying a massive ancestral post into their community museum, 2021. Photo courtesy of Tzu-Ning Li.
These moments revealed something that conventional museum language often struggles to articulate: objects are not passive heritage. They provoke deeply affective responses. They reactivate memory, family and kinship, spirituality, identity, and unresolved historical relationships.
In many Indigenous communities in Taiwan, ancestral objects are not understood merely as “artefacts” or “specimens.” They are often treated as extensions of persons, families, or ancestral presences. Some objects retain ritual restrictions; others carry names, stories, or relationships that remain socially meaningful even after decades inside museum storage. For museum professionals trained within modern conservation systems, encountering these perspectives can be profoundly transformative. It forces museums to reconsider not only how objects should be displayed, but also what an object actually is.
Even when collaborations were exhausting, bureaucratically frustrating, or imperfect in outcome, the experience of “returning” objects — whether physically, symbolically, or temporarily — remained profoundly rewarding.
Taiwan’s “Engagement Turn”
Over the last fifteen to twenty years, Taiwan’s museums have undergone a significant transformation in their relationships with Indigenous communities. Since roughly 2010, many ethnographic and anthropological museums in Taiwan have gradually shifted from “studying Indigenous peoples” toward “working with Indigenous communities.” Borrowing from museum anthropology, this could be described as Taiwan’s own version of an “engagement turn.”
Within this broader shift, however, Taiwan’s museum practices developed along at least two distinguishable directions.
The first direction focused on the objects, i.e. the museum collections and interpretive authority. This model emerged primarily in older museums with historical ethnographic collections, such as the National Taiwan Museum, the Anthropology Museum of National Taiwan University, and the museum of the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica. Practices associated with this approach included inviting elders into museum storage rooms, enabling community reinterpretation of collections, and organising exhibitions and programmes that returned ancestral objects to source communities.
The second direction emphasised co-curation and the redistribution of curatorial resources. In this model, Indigenous communities did not simply comment on museum collections; they actively participated in exhibition design, interpretation, narrative construction, and decision-making. Rather than museums “including” Indigenous voices, exhibitions increasingly became shared projects.
Of course, these two directions were never entirely separate. Most collaborations flowed between them depending on local conditions, institutional limitations, interpersonal relationships, and community expectations. But what interests me about Taiwan’s experience is precisely this flexibility and diversity. Taiwan’s museums did not simply imitate or mindlessly follow international museum trends. Instead, collaborative practices emerged organically through trial and error, shaped by specific local histories, Indigenous activism, democratisation, and long-term interpersonal relationships.
A distinctive historical trajectory shapes Taiwan’s experience. Indigenous collections on the island were assembled under successive regimes of power, including Qing frontier expansion, Japanese colonial anthropology as an instrument of the Governor-General’s administration of Indigenous management policies, and, later, the nation-building of the Chinese Nationalist state. As a result, contemporary museum collaboration in Taiwan is never simply a matter of representation. It also entails confronting layered histories of extraction, classification, displacement, and political marginalisation. In many cases, collaborative exhibitions become spaces not only for reconnecting Indigenous communities with archival collections but also for revisiting unresolved questions about authority: who had the right to collect, interpret, and possess Indigenous culture in the first place, and whose voices continue to shape its meaning today?
Collaboration as a Slow Practice
What Taiwan’s experience perhaps demonstrates most clearly is that collaboration is rarely achieved through institutional declarations alone. It emerges gradually through practice — often slow, imperfect, and deeply situational.
In Taiwan, collaborative Indigenous museology developed not only through theory but also through practical negotiation: transporting sacred objects across mountains, discussing whether ancestral items should be restored, debating conservation requirements, and negotiating language, ritual protocols, and ownership claims. Collaboration was built through repeated visits, trust, misunderstandings, apologies, and long-term relationships.
These processes were often mundane and labour-intensive, yet they fundamentally reshaped how museums understood themselves. Curators and museum professionals gradually learned that collaboration could not simply be reduced to a participatory method or exhibition strategy. It required museums to give up the assumption that professional authority alone was sufficient to define the meaning, value, or future of Indigenous collections.
At the same time, collaboration did not eliminate tensions or differences. Museums and Indigenous communities frequently approached the same objects with very different assumptions, regarding them as historical artefacts, sacred belongings, ancestral presences, research materials, or living cultural responsibilities. Yet rather than treating these differences as obstacles to overcome, many collaborations in Taiwan increasingly treated them as the starting point for dialogue itself.
In this sense, collaborative museology is less about achieving consensus than about learning how to remain in relationship despite differing worldviews, institutional limitations, and uneven histories of power. What emerged was not a perfect model, but a continuing process of negotiation through which museums became more reflexive, more socially accountable, and more willing to listen.
Image credit: Collaborative Indigenous museology developed not only through theory but also through practical negotiation. Photo courtesy of Tzu-Ning Li.
Museums and the Future
Looking back, I increasingly feel that the most important outcome of these collaborations was not the exhibitions themselves, nor even the temporary “return” of objects to Indigenous communities. What changed more fundamentally was the relationship between museums, objects, and people.
For much of the twentieth century, ethnographic museums often operated through a logic of collection and classification. Indigenous objects entered museums as evidence of disappearing cultures, detached from the social worlds that once gave them meaning. Yet the collaborative experiences that have emerged in Taiwan over the past fifteen years suggest another possibility: museum collections can serve as starting points for rebuilding relationships rather than merely preserving remnants of the past.
This transformation did not occur through museum theories alone. It emerged through countless acts of negotiation and encounter — carrying ancestral objects back into mountain communities, listening to elders reinterpret collections in their own languages, debating how sacred belongings should be handled and displayed, or simply learning when museums should step back and remain silent. Through these encounters, museums gradually ceased to function solely as authoritative interpreters of culture and became participants within broader cultural relationships.
In this sense, Indigenous collaboration in Taiwan has never been only about representation. It has also been about rethinking who has the right to speak, who produces knowledge, and what responsibilities museums hold toward the communities whose heritage they preserve. Collaboration became meaningful not because it eliminated differences, but because it created space where different historical experiences, knowledge systems, and cultural values could remain in dialogue without being fully absorbed into a single institutional framework.
Perhaps this is why even temporary acts of “return” can carry such emotional force. The return of objects is never simply about the movement of material things. It is also about the return of memory, responsibility, recognition, and cultural presence. Objects reconnect communities not only to their histories, but also to possibilities for the future.
If museums in the past often imagined themselves as guardians of history, Taiwan’s collaborative experiences suggest a different role for museums in the twenty-first century: not merely preserving culture as something finished and fixed but participating in the ongoing social life of culture itself. Understood this way, museums are no longer only places where histories are stored. They become places where relationships continue to be negotiated, where communities encounter one another again, and where different futures can still be imagined together.
Tzu-Ning Li is an Associate Researcher at the National Taiwan Museum, where he has worked for nearly three decades. He previously served as Head of the Anthropology, Collection Management, and Research Departments. His research focuses on museum collections, Indigenous material culture, and the history of museums in Taiwan. He has curated numerous collaborative exhibitions with Indigenous communities, including a series of pioneering projects that reunited museum-held cultural objects with their source communities.
This article was published as part of the special issue on Polyphonic Curation: Museum Exhibitions and Indigenous Dialogue.