Presentation on Mukurtu CMS 2.0.0 for Indigenous Museums & Heritage Unit (MHST6913) for MMHS at The University of Sydney

By Antony Skinner, SID 198446648

Slide 1

Good morning everyone. The title of my presentation is: “Use that Mukurtu that you use so well.” Which will look at how digital technology using CMS can change collaboration by creating the means for Indigenous communities to control their own heritage.

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But before we begin, “We acknowledge and pay respect to the traditional owners, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, of the Country on which we meet. It is upon their ancestral lands that the University of Sydney is built. As we share our own knowledge, teaching, learning, and research practices within this University, we also pay respect to local Aboriginal knowledge(s).” This presentation may contain images of Indigenous people who may have passed away.

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What is Mukurtu (Mook-oo-too)? ‘The word “mukurtu” in Warumungu is “dilly bag” which hold sacred items and are accessible by acting responsibly within the community and gaining the permission of knowledgeable community leaders. Like the dilly bag the Mukurtu Content Management System (CMS) 2.0.0 is a “safe keeping place,” a community repository for cultural materials and knowledge that grows from continued use, dialogue and negotiations. The Warumungu community maintains the original archive at the Nynikka Nyunyu Art and Culture Centre where people access their materials, deposit new content, add knowledge and information to existing content.’ Warumungu elder, Michael Jampin Jones chose Mukurtu as the name for the system to remind users that the digital archive, too, was a safe keeping place where Warumungu people could share stories, knowledge, and cultural materials properly.

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How did it begin? It began as software project in response to the specific archival needs of the Warumungu Aboriginal community. Development began in 1995 as a joint initiative of Dr Kim Withey and Dr Michael Ashley at the Center for Digital Archeology (CoDA), affiliated with the University of California Berkeley. By 2002, the Warumungu had identified thousands of resources in need of a comprehensive archive system that was capable of maintaining cultural protocol. After the Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari archive launched in 2007, communities worldwide shared their desires to have a similar platform for their own cultural heritage management. In 2008, the Mukurtu codebase was updatd to create the Plateau Peoples’ Web Portal, extending the original Mukurtu core features and functions to include both institutional and tribal catalogue records, different metadata systems, and multiple communities in an online portal. In 2014, Shepard reviewed the product stating, ‘Mukurtu is being used around the world. Its platform flexibility creates opportunities for managing collections of a variety of media.’ In April 2015, the 2nd version was launched with mobile application for iOS and Android to follow.

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What are the features of Mukurtu CMS 2.0.0?

1. TK (Traditional Knowledge) Labels – to ensure users follow and respect Indigenous material when gathering, creating, or sharing digital cultural heritage;

2. Cultural Protocols – determine the levels of access based on community needs and values;

3. Collections – allows users to curate content into formal collections with infinite viewing and sharing possibilities;

4. Roundtrip – allows material to be imported and exported without losing meaning or protocols;

5. Community Pages – features: Home pages, theme and sub-themes, core metadata and metadata extraction and geographical mapping.

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Why is it important? Mukurtoo is a tool to help, as Unruh states, ‘indigenous self-representation — the ability of indigenous peoples to speak for themselves rather than be spoken for by institutional powers— which is vital to the de-colonization effort.’ And in the words of Unruh it can also been seen as a dialogical method to challenge ‘the traditionally imperial nature of museums in colonized countries’. In my view it also helps to divest museums of their traditional institutional hierarchical authority of knowledge keeping. As Harrison posits, the history of collaboration between museums and source communities has been an imbalanced relationship, due to the very nature of the formation of the museum. I think Mukurtu allows source communities to have initiative and be contemporary curators of their heritage independently of museums. This is expressed in Mukurtu’s mission statement: ‘Mukurtu (MOOK-oo-too) is a grassroots project aiming to empower communities to manage, share, preserve, and exchange their digital heritage in culturally relevant and ethically-minded ways. We are committed to maintaining an open, community-driven approach to Mukurtu’s continued development. Our first priority is to help build a platform that fosters relationships of respect and trust.’ However, as Museums & Galleries NSW notes, not only can Indigenous communities share their digital heritage, there is also the potential for major institutions to unlock their collections and digitally repatriate their Indigenous collections.

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