Shaping collaboration: Considering institutional culture

Laura Peers and Alison Brown in their recent book, Museums and Source Communities, suggest that collaborative relationships established between museums and source communities are contingent on three things: the nature of the source community; the political relationship between the source community and the museum; and the geographical proximity of museums to these communities (2003: 3). In this paper, I add another factor to these three: the unique culture of the individual museum. It draws on research I did on collaborative projects undertaken by the Calgary's Glenbow Museum and the Blackfoot peoples in southern Alberta and Montana, and the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, BC and the Nuu-chah-nulth people of the West Coast of Vancouver Island.