This volume combines some of the most influential published research in this emerging field with newly commissioned essays on the issues, problems and lessons involved in collaborating museums and source communities.

Focusing on museums in the UK, North America and the Pacific, the book highlights three areas which demonstrate the new developments most clearly:

• the museum as field site or 'contact zone' - a place which source community members enter for purposes of consultation and collaboration
• visual repatriation - the use of photography to return images of...

In 1925, Beatrice Blackwood of the University of Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum took thirty-three photographs of Kainai people on the Blood Indian Reserve in Alberta as part of an anthropological project. In 2001, staff from the museum took copies of these photographs back to the Kainai and worked with community members to try to gain a better understanding of Kainai perspectives on the images. 'Pictures Bring Us Messages' is about that process, about why museum professionals and archivists must work with such communities, and about some of the considerations that need to be addressed...

When the Franklin Motor Expedition set out across the Canadian Prairies to gather First Nations artifacts, it was with the assumption that they were collecting mementos of dying cultures. As brutal assimilation policies threatened to decimate First Nations cultures across Canada, an extensive program of ethnographic salvage was in place. Despite having only three members, the expedition amassed hundreds of items, which now comprise the largest single collection of materials from Prairie First Nations held in a British museum.

In the past two decades, the relationship between Canadian...

When the Franklin Motor Expedition set out across the Canadian Prairies to gather First Nations artifacts, it was with the assumption that they were collecting mementos of dying cultures. As brutal assimilation policies threatened to decimate First Nations cultures across Canada, an extensive program of ethnographic salvage was in place. Despite having only three members, the expedition amassed hundreds of items, which now comprise the largest single collection of materials from Prairie First Nations held in a British museum.

In the past two decades, the relationship between Canadian...

In 2010, five magnificent Blackfoot shirts, now owned by the University of Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum, were brought to Alberta to be exhibited at the Glenbow Museum, in Calgary, and the Galt Museum, in Lethbridge. The shirts had not returned to Blackfoot territory since 1841, when officers of the Hudson's Bay Company acquired them. The shirts were later transported to England, where they had remained ever since.

Exhibiting the shirts at the museums was, however, only one part of the project undertaken by Laura Peers and Alison Brown. Prior to the installation of the exhibits, groups...