For over a decade, the Pitt Rivers Museum has engaged in sustained collaborative work with Indigenous peoples whose cultural belongings, acquired through histories of dispossession and colonial violence, are now held in Oxford. Part of the work has helped reposition the museum as a site of cultural care rather than a repository of extracted well preserved “assets.” Drawing on four recent projects that have prioritised listening and collaboration grounded in Indigenous self-determination—including Maasai: Living Cultures, Naga: A Path Home, Shuar: Proyecto Tsantsa, and Evenki: Wandering in Other Worlds—Prof. Van Broekhoven explores how Indigenous-led partnerships can enable transformational change through shifting power dynamics on an institutional and societal level.

This lecture examines how Indigenous-led partnerships challenge entrenched academic norms that privilege written documentation over Indigenous knowledge systems. In some contexts, communities have chosen not repatriation but cultural care, reconciliation, and processes of peace-building through reparative justice, using collaboration as a catalyst to renew and strengthen their own governance structures and to address internal inequities shaped by colonial histories. In others, existing peace-making frameworks have been reactivated to collectively confront the enduring impact of colonialism and to imagine pathways for recovery and decolonising the present. Across these contexts, regenerative partnerships can support peace, healing, and structural repair, even as such shifts may be experienced as loss by those long accustomed to institutional advantage.

Professor Laura Van Broekhoven is the Director of the Pitt Rivers Museum and Professor of Museum Studies, Ethics and Material Culture at the University of Oxford. As a member of the Colonial Collections Committee, she advises the Dutch Ministry of Culture on repatriation. She is an international authority on museum ethics and the development of new praxis in the field of ethnographic museums, especially with regards to redress and repatriation, always working through partnership. At the 2022 European Museum of the Year Awards, Laura was awarded the Kenneth Hudson Award for Institutional Courage and Professional Integrity by the European Museum Forum as recognition of four museum directors for their ‘”personal courage and professional integrity in their continuous contributions to developing a new global ethics for museums, addressing the urgent and contentious issues of decolonization, restitution, reparation and repatriation.” In May 2025, Laura won the “Making a difference globally” VC award and the Museum+Heritage ‘Partnership of the Year’ award for the groundbreaking Maasai Living Cultures project.