Southeast Asian Connections and Collections at the Burke Museum

Abstract

Community engagement has only more recently become a focus for museums in the past few decades, despite a much longer history of the institution which traces back to the European curiosity cabinets of the eighteenth century, labeling anything non-European as oddities and outside the “norm.” Museums have been used as tools of colonialism, stealing and storing cultural pieces as objects and out of context from the communities to which they belong, including ancestral remains and ritual relics. With this controversial history, community-based practices are increasingly important for institutions to build into their programming as just one of many ways towards decolonizing. The collections at the Burke Museum holds over 6,000 cultural pieces originating from the region of Southeast Asia—the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma, and Laos. While the region is incredibly diverse, they are tied through language and art, belief and spirituality, and experiences of colonialism, imperialism, and war. The diaspora of Southeast Asian Americans in the Pacific Northwest is very visible through the many community and student organizations in the Seattle area. Bridging the gap between the Southeast Asian-identifying community and the collection at the Burke is the purpose of the project framework, where participants will have the opportunity to use the museum as a space and as a resource to connect to their heritage. Through this process, collections pieces will be imbued with new meanings and stories.