Michelle Horwood

Michelle Horwood's research investigated innovative ways for Māori communities to develop relationships with museums that hold collections of their heritage.

Before my candidature as a PhD student I worked as a heritage consultant in the Whanganui region after more than two decades as curator at the Whanganui Regional Museum where I worked with Whanganui communities to develop innovative ways to care for, access and interpret the region’s heritage collections both within and outside museum. During this time the museum was at the forefront of developments in New Zealand museums’ practice initiating governance changes to embody biculturalism and embed the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi into its constitution. This had a flow on effect into Museum policy and procedures formulation enabling Māori communities to participate more fully in the care of and access to their taonga held in trust by the Museum. One outcome was a joint publication with iwi historian Che Wilson of a book about the Museum’s taonga Māori collection, Te Ara Tapu, Sacred Journeys.

I am therefore mindful of the issues impacting individuals and groups when accessing their cultural heritage housed within museum collections. My PhD research aimed to progress innovative ways for Māori communities to initiate and develop on-going relationships with museums that hold collections of their ancestral heritage when they are geographically remote? It also considered how acknowledging disparate cultural perspectives can improve understanding of the past and present life of the objects for the communities today.

As a case study, I worked in partnership with Ngā Paerangi iwi from the Whanganui River, a collection of their taonga tuku iho at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, England and the staff responsible for this collection.

The title of Michelle's PhD is: 'Worlds Apart - Indigenous Re-Engagement with Museum-held Heritage: A New Zealand / United Kingdom Case Study".

Michelle has been appointed to a new position in Toihoukura at the Eastern Institute of Technology. She took up this position, as the Lecturer / Programme Co-ordinator for the new Te Ara Pourewa Graduate Diploma in Heritage and Museum Studies programme, in June 2015.