Written by Michel D. Lee 李東
Image credit: Provided by the author.
Museum collections contain knowledge from the ancestors of peoples today, whose cultures have often been compromised by colonialism and modernisation. At a time of changing societal roles for museums, collections not only present ways of being and knowing. They are now also used by the descendant communities in efforts to revitalise their cultures. Cooperation between museums and peoples connected to museum collections helps to bridge gaps within the current knowledge systems of both the communities and the museum. This is part of the restitution work museums can conduct with peoples whose ancestral objects were collected in colonial contexts.
Between 01 October 2025 and 31 March 2026, the exhibition ‘Ki cacepeliw: From Across the Sea, Welcome Home (從海那邊‧歡迎回家)’ was held at the Shizi Township Cultural Center in Pingtung County, Taiwan. This was the result of a three-year collaboration, centred on a collection of Southern Paiwan objects at the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm, Sweden, and the descendants of the community from which the objects were collected. The Paiwan people are one of the sixteen indigenous groups officially recognised in Taiwan. As the title indicates, the exhibition presented a homecoming of ancestral objects.
Image credit: Opening ceremony of the exhibition ‘Ki cacepeliw: From the Other Side of the Sea, Welcome Home (從海那邊‧歡迎回家)’ on 01 October 2025 at Shizi Township Cultural Center. Provided by the author.
Since 2021, starting with the Taking Care Project and the resulting exhibition called ‘We are Seediq,’ the National Museums of World Culture (Statens museer för världskultur, SMVK) in Sweden has been working with indigenous Taiwanese descendant communities and their respective cultural material stewarded at the Museum of Ethnography (one of the museums under SMVK). Although the Taking Care Project ended in 2023, the work with the Taiwan collections at the Museum continues, and the values and certain methodologies from the Taking Care/We Are Seediq project that endeavour to decolonise traditional museum methodologies are kept as a framework for collaboration. For example, descendant communities are seen as the cultural inheritors of the objects, regardless of their legal status, and have a voice in their own history and culture. From a conservation perspective, the concept of shared stewardship is practised, as the knowledge holders within descendant communities have the best understanding of the cultural contexts of the objects. Any conservation treatment carried out on the objects was first discussed and approved together with members of the partner community. Otherwise, something that could be culturally or historically significant for the community may be compromised through well-meaning but ill-informed conservation work. Once this type of positioning has been established, other roles between the museum and community representatives become clearer.
From a curatorial perspective, one of the main purposes of the project working with the Taiwan collections is to identify descendant communities and connect them to their ancestral objects. After a descendant community is informed, it is at the group’s discretion to propose a collaboration with the museum regarding the collections. Collaborations can also depend on the funding and resources each potential partner contributes. When working with members of both the Seediq community and the Southern Paiwan of Shizi Township, the partners conducted their own fieldwork. Although the two groups had different methodologies, interviewing elders was central to both. Only the oldest members of their communities may still retain firsthand memories of many of the types of objects found in older museum collections.
Perhaps the most important indigenous Taiwan collection within SMVK is the Nakahara collection held at the Museum of Ethnology. This collection comprises 149 objects collected by the Japanese botanist Genji Nakahara between 1906 and 1907. The importance of this collection lies not only in its relatively early date of collection, but also in the fact that Nakahara recorded the names of many tribes from which the objects were collected. Despite the common story of forced migrations of indigenous peoples during the period of Japanese rule on Taiwan (1895-1945), knowing the names of the source tribes allows for the possibility of locating the descendant groups. [Note: Please see Lee, Michel D. and Aoife O’Brien, ‘Histories of the Taiwan Collections’ in Michel D. Lee et al. (eds), We Are Seediq (Stockholm: Statens museer för världskultur, 2023) pp. 8-9]
When starting the work to locate descendant groups whose ancestral objects are held at the Museum, Shizi Township Cultural Center was amongst the first to respond to the enquiries. All information the Museum had at the time about the Nakahara collection (images of the objects and archival documents) was sent to relevant people in Taiwan, including museum curators, indigenous authors, and other academics, to ask whether they knew of the documented tribes or the whereabouts of their descendants. It was soon realised that the name ”Chakobokoboji” written in the archival material was in fact Tjakuvukuvulj (大龜文) [Note: Tjakuvukuvulj was a powerful confederation led by two chief families – Ruvaniyau and Tjuleng – from the village of Tjakuvukuvulj, and it has been recorded since the Dutch period in Taiwan (1624-1662)].
Interpreting the location names in the archives can be complicated, as they were first transcribed from indigenous languages into, presumably, Japanese, and then transcribed again into Latin letters. Other communities related to Tjakuvuvulj were also recorded, such as “Chachasoa,” “Chacharabin,” and “Chacharabia.” After fieldwork conducted by the Shizi Township Culture Center, the names were discovered to correspond with Tjaljasuaq/Tjuljasuaq (外馬里巴), Tjatjaruving and Tjualjadraviya, respectively. Other recorded communities, such as “Sozan,” have yet to be confirmed [Note: Telephone discussion with Nuai Giring (何鳳美), responsible for research in this project, on 27 May 2026].
Image credit: Stone ruins from the old site of Tjakuvukuvulj, where some of the Southern Paiwan objects at the Museum of Ethnography were collected. Provided by the author.
A collaboration was formed between the Pingtung County Shizi Township Culture Center, the National Taiwan Museum and SMVK, and a memorandum of understanding was officially signed on 06 December 2023. The purpose of the cooperation was to work towards bringing the Southern Paiwan objects back to the community in Shizi Township for a loan exhibition at the Cultural Center. The role of the National Taiwan Museum was to assist with issues, such as guidance on the exhibition loan procedure and exhibition planning. SMVK also supported the loan process and waived the usual loan fee, as the lenders are descendants of the source community for most of the objects. This author led the work and methodologies of the cooperation within SMVK and contributed information about the history of the collections, from the time of collection to the present day. Fieldwork about the objects was carried out by staff of the Shizi Township Cultural Center, interviewing elders belonging to the various tribes under the Tjakuvukuvulj system, which are today split amongst various townships due to forced migrations during the period of Japanese rule. A research delegation from Shizi Township also travelled to Stockholm from 14 to 23 June 2023 to study the objects in person.
Image credit: The research delegation from Shizi Township compares a recreated robe with the original (1909.21.0019) at the Museum of Ethnography on 18 May 2024. Provided by the author.
The community of Shizi Township had suffered much cultural loss over the 20th century, largely due to assimilation attempts by Japanese authorities and then language suppression and cultural neglect under the KMT government through much of the second half of the 20th century. Important ceremonies, such as Maleveq, or the Five-Year Ceremony – a time when humans reconnect with the spirit world and ancestral spirits are invited to bless the community – are no longer practised by this particular community. There is, therefore, a great longing among many to relearn and revive their culture, including decorative patterns and instruments that were used in their community more than 100 years ago.
The forty-eight objects that were loaned to Shizi Township mostly came from Tjakuvukuvulj and some of its satellite tribes within the same governing system. Many discoveries about the past culture of Shizi Township resulted from this cooperation. Headdresses in the collection made from the teeth of lemon sharks and crab claws are unfamiliar to the community today and remind them of their past connection to the ocean. Mr Mulaneng Patadailj (白鴻章) is one of the craftspeople working in embroidery and recreated the human heads and connected drinking-cup patterns on a knife belt in the museum’s collection, as well as a textile panel with diamond-shaped patterns, which was originally collected from Tjakuvuvukulj.
Image credit: Recreation (right) of the embroidered pattern of human heads and linked drinking cups by Mr. Mulaneng Patadailj (白鴻章), compared with an enlarged image of the original (1909.21.0055) (left). Provided by the author.
Image credit: Recreation (left) of an embroidered panel with diamond patterns by Mr. Mulaneng Patadailj (白鴻章), compared with the original (1909.21.0078) on display. Provided by the author.
The collection also includes a single-pipe nose flute collected from Tjuljasuaq. It was previously unknown, within living memory, that their group used single-pipe flutes, as only the double-pipe nose flute has been preserved today. Previously, only men played nose flutes. However, as the tradition needed to adapt in order to survive, this knowledge has now also been passed down to women. Ms Sauniaw Tjuveljevelj (少妮瑤.久分勒分), a nose flute player, was particularly touched when seeing the flute from the Museum’s collection, as it came from the ancestral tribe – Tjuljasuaq. She has now recreated the nose flute using exact measurements, even going back to the old site of Tjuljasuaq to collect the bamboo. After a closer examination of the flute in the Museum’s collection, she plans to make an even more exact recreation. Through Ms Tjuveljevelj, the sound of the single-pipe nose flute is being heard within their community for the first time in over 100 years. Mr Mulaneng Patadailj and Ms Sauniaw Tjuveljevelj are just two of the people working with recreations based on historic objects, and it is hoped that even more people will be inspired by the objects in the exhibition. Even within a changing culture, there is still a longing for reconnection with its past.
Image credit: Ms Sauniaw Tjuveljevelj (少妮瑤.久分勒分) taking notes about the single-pipe nose flute (1909.21.0087) in the collection of the Museum of Ethnography. Provided by the author.
One of the key aspects of restitution work within museums is the connection between collections and communities. Cultivating a good connection is the foundation that paves the way for further restitution work, which may also include repatriation, should the relevant groups decide to make a claim in the future. From the museum curator’s perspective, a main aim of the cooperations in the Taiwan projects is to maintain long-term relationships and dialogue with the descendants of the source communities. What might be considered a mere “object” within the larger context of the museum may be ancestral memories and connections for the descendant groups. For communities working towards cultural healing and revitalisation, museum collections may be an important part of re-bridging lost knowledge and identity. The physical objects not only embody aesthetics and technology, but they also carry intangible culture. Decoding the objects and their contexts takes time and cannot be completed in a single collaboration. Many questions still remain about the objects after the ‘Ki cacepeliw’ project. It is therefore crucial that the relationship between the museum and the community continues even after a project’s completion, and that the link between the collections and communities is cultivated and strengthened. This is not an easy task, as museum organisations have ever-changing goals and priorities. It is therefore important that individuals, both within the museum and in the community, make an effort to keep the relationship alive.
Acknowledgement: The author thanks 趙啟明 (Lawa), an Atayal author, and 李子寧 (Li Tzu-ning), Curator at the National Taiwan Museum, for helping to identify some of the tribes recorded in the Nakahara collection.
Michel Lee is a Curator working with the China, Korea, and Sven Hedin collections at the National Museums of World Culture, Sweden. He received his first degree in Anthropology at George Washington University, Washington, D.C. and later worked in the Department of Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. He received his MA in the History of Art and Archaeology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Upon completion, he became the Curator and, later, acting Director at the Museum of East Asian Art in Bath, U.K. He served as the Museum Director of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, National Museums of World Culture, Sweden, from 2013 to 2015. Since 2020, Mr Lee has been working to connect indigenous communities in Taiwan with their ancestral objects in museum collections.
This article was published as part of the special issue on Polyphonic Curation: Museum Exhibitions and Indigenous Dialogue.