Meshkwajisewin, Paradigm Shift: Anishinaabe pipes at the Manitoba Museum

This paper looks at the role of Anishinaabe pipes, opwaaganag, in disrupting museum practices and decolonizing the Manitoba Museum during a period of gallery renewal (Matthews 2021).

The twelve opwaaganag now participating in five new Treaty exhibits are grammatically animate in Anishinaabemowin and in their ceremonial mode, they not only live, bemaadizid, but are what Anishinaabemowin speakers would call bemaaji’iwemagak, those who bring new life into something. When they first began to participate on behalf of First Nations people in the new Treaty exhibits, they initiated new relationships between the museum and its ceremonial partners, forcing the institution to acknowledge the relational obligations that Anishinaabe personhood implies, and to surrender interpretive authority to Indigenous ontologies.

The pipes, as diplomats and teachers have rebalanced the relationship between the Indigenous communities and the museum and are using their kin-making skills and cultural context to foreground Indigenous sensory experience and reflect Indigenous ways of being.

About the speaker

Maureen Matthews, D. Phil (Oxon), is an Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at the University of Manitoba and former Curator of Cultural Anthropology at the Manitoba Museum (2011 to 2023). Before joining the museum, Dr. Matthews was a CBC radio investigative journalist and both her museum anthropology research and her journalism focus on the wisdom and humour of Anishinaabeg and Nehiyawak speaking peoples. Dr. Matthews’ book, Naamiwan’s Drum: The Story of a Contested Repatriation of Anishinaabe Artefacts, won the 2017 Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction at the Manitoba Book Awards. Over the last four years she has produced six Anishinaabemowin /English books for the communities of the Pimachiowin Aki UNESCO World Heritage Site.photography, with over 100 invited and juried screenings/referred exhibitions.