Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Searching For Tūpuna, Nicola Andrews

Gleeson Library Faculty and Staff Research and Scholarship

The Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture opened the “Pacific Voices” exhibition in 1997, a community-led exhibition of Indigenous cultures throughout the Pacific Rim, including Māori. Twenty years later, Nicola Andrews, a Ngāti Pāoa Māori student at the University of Washington, serendipitously visited the Burke and began collaborating with the museum to reframe taonga (treasure, anything prized) descriptions in its catalogue and physical spaces. The Burke collection also includes 962 Māori photographs spanning the 19^th century, which were removed from Aotearoa New Zealand and donated to the museum in 1953. These

photographs had been digitized but not published, …