Introduction

Gabbie Mangaser

What first comes to mind when we think of museum collections?

Maybe the first image you see is from your class field trip as a child: the large T-rex skull or the pterodactyl skeleton looming overhead, a tangible ammonite fossil from millions of years ago. Maybe you pictured a museum in its most traditional sense: a maze of galleries with crown moulding, fragments of marble busts on mounts and an abundance of oil paintings in gilded frames. Or, perhaps you visualized dioramas of wax figures interacting within their curated environment: evolutions of modern humans, or representations of global Indigeneities posed with shields and spears, huddled around a fake campfire. And honestly, it is perfectly okay to admit to yourself that you thought of Indiana Jones, Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson riffing in Night at the Museum, or even Nic Cage stealing the Declaration of Independence.

Whatever was imagined, your initial idea of a museum likely did not include the ways in which collections come to be: abandoned loans with little or questionable provenance to begin with, ethnology expeditions to “places unknown” to learn about people outside the Global North, or an ever-growing expansive repository of shelves that haven’t been touched in years. American museums are all of the above and more, often existing no more than storehouses for cultural belongings, archives, and even ancestral remains from Black, brown, and Native communities.

More and more each day however, museums with anthropological collections are asked to re-evaluate their purpose, their holdings, and the ways in which these collections can be of greater service to the public and to the collections’ relevant communities. In the US context for example, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was enacted in 1990, setting a standard for institutions to return human remains, funerary or sacred objects, or objects of cultural patrimony to the tribes and lands from which they were taken from. Most recent regulations passed in 2024 provide further protections for belongings covered under NAGPRA, in which objects would not be displayed or researched without pre-approval from their respective tribes. While some institutions’ collections fall outside of NAGPRA, which includes most, if not all, belongings from Oceania and Asia, this does not mean there is no obligation to their communities of origin and their diasporas.

Reimagining Community at the Museum

While there is little legally-defined responsibility to diasporic communities whose cultural collections are well-represented in many museums, more recently there have been efforts made towards ethical standards regarding community engagement and collaboration. At the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture located on the University of Washington campus, communities are at the heart of the arts and cultures collections. This project works to build upon these relationships, with the Filipino American community and global Philippine diaspora—building a barangay (neighborhood in Tagalog)—meaningfully, purposefully, and sustainably.

The museum sits upon the unceded lands of the Coast Salish people, at the University of Washington Seattle campus. It was designated the official Washington State Museum in 1899, a pivotal year in Philippine history amidst the Philippine-American War, commencing after the Treaty of Paris the year prior. The treaty transferred “legal title” of the Philippine Islands, Guam, and Puerto Rico from Spain to the United States government for $20 million dollars. Remnants of this history are still present in the collections today, with several belongings considered to be spoils of war including soldiers’ uniforms, dummy rifles, and a revolutionary flag from the Battle of Santa Cruz (1899).

A drawer featuring a variety of instruments and water carriers from the Philippines. Photo by Gabbie Mangaser.

A drawer of Philippine jewelry. Photo by Gabbie Mangaser.

Over 4,200 cultural belongings and archival materials from the Philippines are housed at the museum including photographs depicting early life in Luzon and Mindanao, textiles and adornments, carvings, basketry and weavings, and everyday belongings. In addition, the Philippines represents the heritage collections’ largest assemblage of weapons and shields.

The Oceanic collections have had immense success in connecting with Pacific Islander students and their respective communities on campus and in the greater Seattle area. The ongoing work of training students in working with museum collections and centering their heritage in the practice, rather than the belongings themselves, has made an enormous difference in how the museum is perceived. Instead of the museum as an accumulation of objects, it is a true caretaker of cultural belongings, with growing potential to be a space for members of other underrepresented communities to connect with their culture.

Many of the Asian collections are still widely unknown to local diasporic communities, but greater community engagement with the Philippine collections has flourished in the past several years. From a UW Museology Master’s thesis regarding a collections review with the belongings, Dr. Rick Bonus began utilizing the collections in his Critical Filipinx American Histories course, for students to imbue the collections with their own understandings of Filipino American histories., Since then, the Asian American Studies class has visited the Burke annually to interact with the collections, along with several other UW courses and organizations such as Southeast Asian Pasts and Futures (SEAPF) and the Filipino American Student Association to name a few.

Building the Barangay

Barangay is a Tagalog term meaning neighborhood or village, its abbreviation “BRGY” welded to metal-arched signs or printed on vinyl banners, like a gateway to a community. They are common across the Philippines, as if to give visitors an indication of where they are if they’re lost, or to call someone home. The word itself is thought to come from the Tagalog term of the first boats that supplemented Austronesian migration throughout island Southeast Asia, balangay. In a way, barangay can be seen as a double entendre: either a place to call home, or a mode of migration. Its meaning is fluid, representing this project’s attempt to mend connections to missing or lost heritage, while also acknowledging the abundant journeys of Filipino American community members.

As a platform, this project aims to center Philippine and Filipino/a/x voices as they interact with museum spaces and cultural collections. Historically, the focal point of museums have always been its collections. Whether paleontological, archaeological, biological, and certainly anthropological, any given exhibit is designed around the collections. Often, very little voice is given to members of the communities from which the artifacts and specimens in question originate from. Anthropology collections are notorious for the ways in which they have displayed and almost celebrated the colonial violences imposed upon communities of origin by curators, ethnologists, collectors, and the like through representations of cultures outside Europe as “the other.” In traditional museums, artifacts tend to act as proxies for people. Instead, Barangay works to re-imagine the possibilities of museum collections when community members have access to them.

Building the Barangay event held at the Burke Museum on October 17th 2024. Former Washington state representative Velma Veloria speaks about a postcard from the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition of 1909, which happened at the University of Washington campus. Photo by Gabbie Mangaser.

This grant-funded project aims to improve upon the idea of collection reflections, rather than institutional collection reviews. Museum collection reviews are formal procedures in which collections staff work in collaboration with community knowledge holders to identify best care and preservation practices for specific collections, and return context to decontextualized cultural belongings and archival materials. While collection reviews are widely effective tools for source communities to engage with collections, this project proposes collection reflections as a low-stakes, low-barrier approach to facilitate connection between diasporic community members and their well-traveled, respective cultural belongings.

Cultivating in Kapwa

In a pandemic-produced world that has adjusted to hybrid and remote options in the workplace, this project also seeks to alleviate the mere fact that museums are under-resourced, understaffed, and underfunded. A study in 2023 found that over 60 percent of workers in American art museums considered leaving their job, and the field altogether citing low pay and burnout as the top two contenders. Nonetheless, the necessity for engagement between collections and community remains, which only continues to grow. As we explore the ways in which collection reflections can be molded, made accessible, and become valuable through the Barangay project, we also hope to grow this project sustainably, for both the museum and for the community.

A central value in Filipino psychology is that of kapwa, essentially meaning being in community with each other, and more technically, identifying one’s self in another. For many members of the diaspora, kapwa invokes a sense of community rooted in shared cultural values and experiences. While invested in facilitating connections to missing or lost heritage for the diaspora by way of cultural belongings and reflections, Barangay intends to consider kapwa critically in practice, in recognition of the diverse stories that shape the Filipino American community today: “Critical Kapwa pedagogy is about individuals and communities coming together to heal themselves.” Similarly, kapwa can extend from our practices of collections care to include collections stewards, leading to less burnout amongst museum staff and consequentially, greater capacity to bring in community members.

Barangay invites artists, practitioners, students, community members, and any kababayan to engage with the Philippine collections at the Burke Museum. Featured here are links to previous ebook projects, including Dr. Rick Bonus’ Critical Filipinx American Histories and their Artifacts, and Knowledge Kapamilya 2024. Both projects illuminate how students connected to collections and related it to what they were learning regarding Filipino American history, the former for a listed course and the latter for a student cohort. The Philippine collections have had a multitude of visits from community members and organizations before; Barangay encourages these same guests to contribute.

This project, like collections, is not meant to remain static. Barangay seeks to flourish and present to the world multiple voices, diverse stories, and the various ways in which we all find connection to heritage. What interests you? What stories are you hoping to hear? What histories have yet to be uncovered? How is that banig woven? It reminds me of one my lola has in the province. How much time does it take to create just one tnalak? I wonder who created it and how it ended up at the Burke. That barong is so beautiful, mine isn’t half as nice; they’re so expensive now! There is no one way to take root in cultural belongings or archives, but whatever it means to reflect and connect, we hope to learn together.

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This project is funded by the Henry Luce Foundation.

For more information on the Philippine Collections, check out our entry on the Mapping Philippine Material Culture project, hosted by SOAS University of London.

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