Locally Based, Globally Relevant
By Grace Miller, Graduate Research Fellow for Arts & Humanities Futures
October 25, 2024
After a long slumber closed for renovations, the newly minted Indiana University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (IUMAA) reopened with a new focus in mind. Museums have a long history of harm, particularly with indigenous and colonized populations, but the new IUMAA is asking important questions about how the academic museum can function with ethics at the forefront of its programming. “What would a museum look like if it was different?” questions Brandie Macdonald, the museum’s Executive Director and a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, “What would an ethical museum look like?”
One of the IUMAA’s four inaugural exhibitions, “Locally Based, Globally Relevant,” was borne out of another one of MacDonald's questions-- she approached Dr. Eduardo Brondizio, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and member of the IU Indigenous Futures team, and asked him to curate an exhibition for the museum’s opening.
Synthesizing years of collaborative research, Brondizio’s exhibition “Locally Based, Globally Relevant” shines a spotlight on indigenous peoples’ ecological impact. Comprised of nearly half a billion people globally with over 5,000 groups and 4,000 languages, these communities manage some of the world’s most well-conserved ecosystems. Their contributions are largely locally-based, but influence entire regional landscapes and impact biodiversity and climate action across the globe..
This exhibition is based off of two source documents. The first, a paper Brondizio authored titled “Locally Based, Regionally Manifested, and Globally Relevant: Indigenous and Local Knowledge, Values, and Practices for Knowledge,” which synthesizes hundreds of scholarly works to create the first global map of indigenous lands, spaces which are oftentimes belittled or ignored when talking about agents of impact on society. “What we found through these years of research is that it is quite the opposite,” Brondizio explains, “We’re talking about millions and millions of people that have a global presence.”
These findings informed the creation of a new World Map, taking up an entire wall in the exhibition space. The scale of this exhibit gives visitors a totally new perspective of how much land is managed and occupied by indigenous peoples-- approximately 28% of the global land mass, or over a quarter of our planet. The major significance of indigenous communities, often underrecognized, takes center stage in the narrative of Brondizio’s curation.
The other source document for the exhibition is written by global indigenous organizations themselves-- a collection of reports assembled for the UN Convention of Biological Diversity. These reports are case studies of different communities finding ways to contribute positively to the environment, separated locally, but impacted by the same global concerns.
The six case studies showcased in the exhibition come directly out of these reports, amplifying the indigenous organizations’ voices rather than displaying them as simply curiosities. “In this new phase [of the IUMAA], there was a rethinking about how we exhibit and how we represent particularly indigenous individuals…We took as much care as possible that this exhibition speaks, shares, and brings forward a different view of indigenous peoples today and represents them well,” Brondizio explains.
The different pathways of contribution are illustrated on six interactive, double-sided panels-- on one side is the local story of what groups are doing on the ground in their home communities, and on the other, the global impact of the knowledge gained from these peoples’ ways of knowing.
Representing the “Land Management” pathway, the Balngarra Clan of Northern Australia uses traditional fire management practices to care for their land, seasonally scheduling a controlled burn that uses far less heat and decreases wildfire risk. Globally, in the wake of unseasonably hot, dry, and windy conditions, bushfires rage through Australia, Canadian fires decrease air quality in the western half of the United States, and black smoke from the Amazon clouded the skies of Brazil. As conditions continue to heat up, cold controlled burns, like those the Balngarra Clan employs, may be necessary to control damages.
In the “Conservation and Restoration” pathway, the exhibition explores the local and global impacts of the acai berry, specifically how the people of the Amazonian floodplanes have managed the acai palm since the eighteenth century. Their innovations in forest and agroforestry management techniques allowed them to keep up with exponentially growing demand. Today, acai fruit production is not only profitable for the area, but also allows communities to transform unproductive and degraded lands into biodiversity-rich agroforestry. Globally, not only are acai fruits more readily available in stores for customers to enjoy, but the techniques employed by Amazonian peoples to rehabilitate previously untenable land are lessons to heed as environmental disaster threatens many of our coastlines.
Along with showcasing the impact that these specific local communities have on the broader global environment, Brondizio wants visitors to connect with the people in these stories and remember that local practices matter. “I see it all the time in my classroom that my students either fell disempowered, overwhelmed, or have a sense of anxiety around the scale of these problems that we deal with, and alleviating that is a part of this too,” he explains.
“Not everything is successful, and not everything is rosy. But at the same time, we want to give visitors a sense of actual people doing things on the ground. Hopefully, every one will see that the actions that we take are relevant, and it is the collective action that we all take that is important to affect the world around us.”
The "Locally Based, Globally Relevant" exhibition, through showcasing indigenous ways of conserving land and knowing community, seeks to show the broader globe a way of reckoning with climate crisis-- one that is steeped in history instead of relying on new corporate technologies that can sometimes cause more negative land impact than they mitigate. By listening to the communities that have been and continue to navigate climate events, we can attune ourselves differently to the world around us, solving our local problems with indigenous knowledges to make environmental ripples that effect global, collective solutions.
Along with the IU Arts and Humanities Indigenous Futures Initiative, this exhibition was made possible with the help of the IU Office of the Vice-President for Humanities, Authors of the Local Biodiversity Outlook and the Forest Peoples Programme, Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, Authors of the ‘global land map of Indigenous lands’ Garnett et al. 2018, Authors of the article “Locally based, regionally manifested, globally relevant: Indigenous and local knowledge, values, and practices for nature” Brondizio et al. 2021, and Theresa Quill, IU Map and Spatial Data Librarian.
The "Locally Based, Globally Relevant" exhibition opens August 26th, 2024 in the North Lobby Gallery in the newly renovated Museum of Archeology and Anthropology at 416 N. Indiana Avenue, Bloomington.