Unsettling reconciliation: on Indigenous Care Giving, Museums, and the Future of Conservation
John Moses in conversation with Hanna B. Hölling, Samidha Pusalkar, Juliana Robles de la Pava, and Marcello Rechberger
As part of the ongoing conversations within the Critical Conservation project, on July 2, 2026, we had the pleasure of welcoming John Moses, former Director of Repatriation and Indigenous Relations at the Canadian Museum of History and descendant of the Delaware and Upper Mohawk bands from the Six Nations of the Grand River Territory near Brantford, Ontario. In this conversation, Moses shared with us how, for him, it is important to place museum conservation practice within the broader context of Canada’s overarching Indigenous Truth and Reconciliation agenda. As Indigenous museum professional and consultant, he further reflected on how conservation practices must also be understood in relation to questions of personhood and agency, particularly the need to restore these within communities from which cultural belongings originate. At the same time, Moses raised an important issue: how can we rethink conservation and museums as affective spaces in which futurity can be reimagined through collective and ancestral engagements.
One of the recurring questions within the Critical Conservation project is deceptively simple: What exactly are we conserving?
For many museum professionals, the answer appears self-evident. Collections exist to be preserved. Conservation safeguards objects for future generations. Museums are institutions built around permanence. Yet our recent conversation with Moses challenged these assumptions. Rather than taking conservation, collections, or even museums themselves as given, Moses invited us to begin elsewhere: with people, languages, relationships, and the continuity of cultural life.
Conservation after cultural rupture
John Moses’s own biography illustrates why these questions cannot remain abstract. A member of two First Nations communities, his family history is marked by Canada’s residential school system. While his Mohawk mother had the benefit of being raised at home alongside her siblings in a conventional Six Nations family setting, three generations of his paternal Delaware (Lenape) family lineage comprising his father (in the 1940s), grandfather (in the 1910s) and great grandfather (in the 1880s), all attended the Mohawk Institute, one of the country’s oldest residential schools, institutions explicitly designed to eradicate Indigenous languages, cultural practices, and systems of knowledge. Their purpose was assimilation.
This illustrates how colonial policies affected not only individuals but entire family lineages, disrupting the intergenerational transmission of language, ceremonies, and cultural knowledge.
For Moses, reconciliation therefore begins with acts of recovery. His own priority, he explains, is relearning his language, an effort inseparable from his work with museums. Language carries not only names but also the concepts, songs, ceremonies, and forms of care through which belongings acquire meaning. When languages disappear, so too do many of the practices that sustained cultural heritage.
Moses also reminded us that cultural loss cannot be understood only through language. It is equally important to ask how Indigenous cultural belongings became separated from the communities that created them. Many objects entered museum collections through colonial expansion, missionary activity, coercive collecting, unequal exchanges, or outright theft. Understanding these histories is not simply a matter of provenance research; it is part of acknowledging the wider systems that disrupted Indigenous cultural continuity. Questions of language, displacement, and collection history therefore remain deeply interconnected.
This perspective fundamentally shifts the terrain of conservation. The question is no longer merely how to preserve objects, but how to restore the cultural conditions that make those objects meaningful, how to restore their personhood and agency within communities.
Beyond repatriation
Discussions of Indigenous heritage in museums often focus on repatriation or rematriation. While repatriation remains essential, Moses suggested that it is only one element within a much broader transformation.
Across Canadian museums, Indigenous internships, artist residencies, advisory structures, and collaborative governance are gradually reshaping institutional practice. At the same time, museums are beginning to recognize Indigenous forms of care as legitimate conservation practices in their own right.
This includes ceremonies that would once have been unimaginable within museum spaces: smudging, pipe ceremonies, ritual food preparation, singing, dancing, and the ceremonial activation of masks and other belongings. Museums increasingly provide dedicated spaces where these practices can occur without exceptional permissions or improvised accommodations. Gathering rooms, ceremonial spaces, and even modest kitchens become integral to the care of collections. Such changes represent a profound shift in institutional thinking.
Such accommodation also raises broader questions about museum design itself. Conventional museums were largely conceived as spaces for observation and preservation, whereas Indigenous care often requires spaces that support cultural performance and community participation. Ceremonial rooms, outdoor gathering spaces, flexible interiors, and conservation laboratories designed around Indigenous practices rather than solely scientific intervention all point towards different architectural possibilities. Rather than asking how ceremonies can fit within existing museums, Moses encouraged thinking about how museums themselves might be designed around Indigenous ways of caring.
This extends beyond architecture. Different Indigenous communities rely upon locally available natural materials, medicines, and plants for cultural care. Museums may therefore need to consider how access to these materials can be maintained, potentially through landscapes or gardens that support community practices rather than treating collections as isolated objects.
The conservation laboratory has long resembled a scientific laboratory—a place of chemistry, measurement, and technical intervention. Moses asks what museum care might look like if it were instead designed around Indigenous protocols of responsibility, ceremony, and community. The question is not whether these practices can fit into conservation, but whether conservation itself can be reimagined through them.
Museums are not the only model
Perhaps most strikingly, Moses questioned whether museums should remain the primary institutional framework for Indigenous heritage at all.
Across Canada, Indigenous cultural centres increasingly create spaces dedicated not to collecting objects but to enabling cultural continuity. They privilege living practices over permanent collections, relationships over ownership, and community participation over institutional authority. Museums become only one possible institutional form among many.
Moses suggested that these centres should not simply be understood as smaller versions of museums. Rather than removing cultural belongings from their contexts, they seek to sustain the social and ceremonial environments in which those belongings continue to live. Such institutions prioritize cultural continuity over exhibition, while still recognizing that museums can contribute through their resources, conservation expertise, funding, and security. The challenge is therefore not choosing between museums and Indigenous cultural centres, but imagining models that combine the strengths of both.
Where museums continue to hold Indigenous belongings, new models are emerging. Some institutions have transferred legal ownership to Indigenous communities while continuing to care for collections collaboratively, allowing belongings to circulate periodically between museums and communities. Conservation becomes a form of stewardship.
A longer history of Indigenous intervention
The changes currently unfolding in Canadian museums did not appear overnight. Moses reminded us that they are part of a much longer history of Indigenous political engagement.
One landmark moment was The Indians of Canada Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal. Conceived during Canada’s centennial celebrations, the pavilion presented Indigenous histories from Indigenous perspectives, unsettling official national narratives and exposing the colonial realities often absent from public memory. Although temporary—it stood only for the duration of the World’s Fair before being dismantled—it has become a landmark in museum history, demonstrating the transformative possibilities of Indigenous self-representation.
Today, the challenge extends beyond representation. As Juliana Robles de la Pava observed during our discussion, drawing on political philosopher Nancy Fraser, contemporary debates increasingly distinguish between the politics of recognition and the politics of redistribution. Representation alone does not transform institutions if authority remains unchanged.
Redistribution also extends to repatriation itself. Moses noted that not all requests can necessarily be addressed simultaneously, making prioritization unavoidable. Human remains, sacred ceremonial belongings, ancestral remains, objects essential for living cultural practices, and items demonstrably removed through theft or coercion may require particular urgency. Such prioritization reflects cultural significance rather than market value.
Equally important is what happens after return. Once belongings have been repatriated, decisions regarding their future care, use, storage, or ceremonial life belong to Indigenous communities themselves. Museums no longer retain authority over these decisions. Repatriation therefore involves not simply the transfer of objects but the restoration of Indigenous jurisdiction over cultural heritage.
Moses’s response pointed toward governance. Many Canadian museums now maintain Indigenous advisory committees. While these are important, advisory structures alone are insufficient. Genuine transformation requires permanent Indigenous leadership within institutions: dedicated executive positions, Indigenous vice-presidents, and governance structures that recognize the distinct voices of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis communities rather than expecting a single representative to speak for all.
Decolonizing museums might therefore mean redistributing authority over collections, research, policy, and institutional futures.
From consultation to Indigenous governance
This broader transformation is also reflected in national initiatives such as the work of the Indigenous Heritage Circle and its collaboration with the Canadian Museums Association’s Indigenous Council, the Canadian Conservation Institute, and other heritage organizations. Their efforts seek not simply to improve consultation but to establish Indigenous-led frameworks for the protection, care, and governance of Indigenous heritage across Canada.
The emphasis is shifting from asking Indigenous communities to participate in existing museum structures towards creating institutional models in which Indigenous knowledge systems shape professional standards themselves.
This represents a significant departure from earlier approaches to conservation. Expertise is no longer understood as residing exclusively within professional disciplines but is increasingly recognised as existing within communities, Elders, language keepers, artists, and cultural practitioners.
Reconciliation as institutional work
The conversation also complicated the meaning of reconciliation. When asked how conservation relates to reconciliation, Moses offered a striking inversion. Reconciliation, he suggested, is largely a responsibility for non-Indigenous Canadians. It requires learning the histories that have long been ignored, acknowledging the violence of colonial institutions including museums, and engaging seriously with the testimonies of residential school survivors—including those of his own father, whose written account of his years at the Mohawk Institute has become an important act of truth-telling within his family. Thus conservators must reconcile themselves not only to the colonial history of their respective countries, but also to the colonial history of the discipline of conservation itself. What does it mean, for example, that conservators presume to treat Indigenous ancestor belongings that were being acquired by museums and other institutions of the state at precisely the same time that natural resources were being extracted from within Indigenous traditional territories without recompense, and that children were being forcibly removed from Indigenous families and communities for the purpose of assimilation at residential schools? Conservators need to reflect upon these matters if they are to reconcile themselves to the colonial roots of their discipline.
For Indigenous communities, the work often takes another form: relearning languages, rebuilding cultural knowledge, reconnecting ceremonies, and restoring practices interrupted through generations of colonial violence.
Moses also emphasized that colonial disruption often fractured relationships within Indigenous communities themselves. Reconciliation therefore involves rebuilding connections between people, languages, ceremonies, and places that colonial policies deliberately sought to sever. Museums can contribute to this process by supporting cultural revitalization, but these relationships ultimately extend far beyond museum walls.
Museums participate in both processes. Yet their most valuable holdings may not always be the objects in storage. Increasingly, communities seek access to archival recordings, unpublished manuscripts, linguistic documentation, draft dictionaries, photographs, and oral histories that support cultural revitalization. The archive, rather than the collection alone, becomes a site of care.
Conservation beyond permanence
John Moses’s reflections resonate deeply with the broader ambitions of Critical Conservation. They remind us that conservation cannot simply become more inclusive while leaving its foundational assumptions intact. Indigenous practices challenge many of the principles upon which modern conservation has historically been built: permanence, ownership, technical expertise, and institutional authority.
Perhaps most importantly, Moses reframed reconciliation as a practice of care that also demands self-reflection from museum professionals and wider society. Decolonization begins not simply by introducing new policies but by educating oneself, confronting uncomfortable histories, and recognising continuing obligations towards communities affected by colonial violence. Institutional change therefore starts with individual responsibility before extending into structural transformation.
What emerges instead is a broader understanding of care—one in which conservation is inseparable from language, ritual, ceremony, governance, relationships, and cultural continuity. The question, then, is no longer simply how museums can accommodate Indigenous knowledge. It is whether conservation itself is prepared to be transformed by it.
For Critical Conservation, this is perhaps the most important provocation of all. Decolonizing conservation is not about adding new voices to an existing framework. It is about recognizing that the very object of conservation, the forms of expertise it privileges, and the institutions through which it operates are all open to fundamental rethinking.
Perhaps the question is then not How do we preserve heritage? but rather Whose ways of caring are allowed to define what heritage –and its conservation– can become?
Further readings
Fraser, Nancy. 1995. “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Post-Socialist’ Age.” New Left Review I/212: 68–93. https://newleftreview.org/issues/i212/articles/nancy-fraser-from-redistribution-to-recognition-dilemmas-of-justice-in-a-post-socialist-age.
Fraser, Nancy, and Axel Honneth. 2003. Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange. London: Verso.
Coulthard, Glen Sean. 2014. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. https://academic.oup.com/minnesota-scholarship-online/book/24162.
Moses, John. 2019. “Lessons Learned: Reconciliation.” Keynote address, 12th North American Textile Conservation Conference, Ottawa.
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 2021 [1999]. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. 3rd ed. London: Zed Books.
Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2012. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1 (1): 1–40.
Simpson, Audra. 2014. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1198w8z.
Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2017. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Canadian sources, which speak directly to John Moses’s work:
Indigenous Heritage Circle. 1994. Report of the Joint Task Force on Museums and Indigenous Peoples. https://museums.in1touch.org/uploaded/web/docs/Task_Force_Report_1994.pdf.
Canadian Museums Association. 2022. Moved to Action: Activating UNDRIP in Canadian Museums. https://museums.ca/uploaded/web/TRC_2022/Report-CMA-MovedToAction.pdf.
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. 2015. Calls to Action. Ottawa. https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/british-columbians-our-governments/indigenous-people/aboriginal-peoples-documents/calls_to_action_english2.pdf.
National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. n.d. “Reports and Survivor Testimonies.” https://nctr.ca/.
Selected scholarship on The Indians of Canada Pavilion (Expo 67):
Mathur, Ashok, Jonathan Dewar, and Mike DeGagné, eds. 2011. Cultivating Canada: Reconciliation through the Lens of Cultural Diversity. Ottawa: Aboriginal Healing Foundation. https://ehprnh2mwo3.exactdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/cultivating-canada-pdf.pdf.
Janes, Robert R., and Richard Sandell, eds. 2019. Museum Activism. London: Routledge. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781351251044/museum-activism-robert-janes-richard-sandell.