Project

Hidden Hands in Colonial Natural Histories is a research project based at McGill University in Montreal. The project will run from 2022 until 2025.

HIDDEN HANDS: Many hands made colonial natural history collections. The dried plants now in herbarium collections were picked, pressed, and labelled. The minerals sparkling from museum cases were dug from the ground and cleaned. Animals were caught and their bones, skins, feathers, or whole bodies were preserved. Collecting and documenting natural history in colonial settings involved a range of technical and intellectual skills provided by local guides and translators, who led naturalists on collecting expeditions, as well as by bird and snake catchers, animal and insect trappers. Local experts in plant knowledge supplied information about the medicinal or culinary uses of plants that was drawn into colonial works on materia medica and economic botany. Women, including women of colour, often played an important role in documenting the natural world, not only through their expertise in collecting, healing and food preparation, but also through visual arts and material culture. Their knowledge and perspectives have frequently been obscured or lost.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS: How can we use the textual and material culture of natural history, including the ethnographic objects also housed in natural history museums, to begin to recover the work, ideas, and motivations of the people whose hands and minds shaped these collections but whose identities have often been forgotten, hidden, or lost? And how can museums, libraries and archives recognize this labour and knowledge in the classification of objects and in the arrangement of collections and exhibitions? How might recovering the human histories behind natural history collections help to develop new ways of interacting with and understanding nature?

Using collections held by McGill University in Montreal, we will:

  • Work with a network of scholars and knowledge keepers to research and recover the hidden hands and missing voices behind colonial natural history collections;
  • Collaborate with librarians, curators and collection specialists to rethink and relabel material in collections to reflect new cultural and scientific insights;
  • Engage with curators, artists, and community collaborators to redesign exhibitions and other media to incorporate recovered histories.

COLLECTIONS: The collections we have chosen to examine in this project were, for the most part, created and collected within a colonial context. While they may have underpinned published records, they have not been documented in detail. They are not for the most part textual records commonly used in historical research, but rather drawings, inscriptions, and biocultural objects and cultural belongings housed in museums and specialist libraries, whose study can provide entry points into the questions we pose. We focus on collections in three repositories at McGill:

  • The Blacker Wood Collection (BWC) at McGill Library Rare Books and Special Collections houses natural history illustrations from Saint-Domingue (Haiti) and from western India, and olas (palm leaf manuscripts) from Sri Lanka;
  • The Redpath Museum contains material culture and minerals extracted from Sri Lanka;
  • The McGill University Herbarium contains pressed plants from Rupert’s Land (Manitoba).

CASE STUDIES: Four case studies provide the opportunity for interdisciplinary teams to recontextualize natural history texts and objects.