The Nooter photo collection and the Roots2Share project of museums in Greenland and the Netherlands

• Published in: Études/Inuit/Studies
• Main Authors: Buijs, Cunera, Jakobsen, Aviâja Rosing
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Association Inuksiutiit Katimajiit Inc. 2011
• Subjects: Greenland; Tiniteqilaaq; East Greenland; Études/Inuit/Studies; Groenland; groenlandais; Sermilik
• Online Access: http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1012840ar; https://doi.org/10.7202/1012840ar

In 2008 two Dutch museums and two Greenland museums started a cooperative venture to share the photo collections of museums in the Netherlands. The photographs were taken from 1965 to 1986 by husband and wife Gerti and Noortje Nooter in Diilerilaaq, a village in the Sermilik Fjord (East Greenland). Gerti Nooter, then curator at the Museon in The Hague and at the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden, was doing fieldwork in that changing hunting community and, as part of that research, took photographs and collected museum objects for both Dutch museums. The National Museum of Ethnology in particular has long had a working relationship with Greenland museums and the local Tunumiit community. Through the visual repatriation project Roots2Share, these photographs have been scanned and returned to the communities where they originated and where they can now be accessed locally. As a product of cross-cultural interactions, they depict ancestors of present-day Tunumiit and carry multiple meanings: ethnological or exotic ones for a Dutch public and historical or ancestral ones for the people of Diilerilaaq. Many stories have been told about them. This article explores the relationship between the photographs and Tunumiit knowledge, as well as issues of cultural heritage, ownership, and sharing of these images. En 2008 deux musées hollandais et deux musées groenlandais ont entamé un partenariat pour partager des collections photographiques conservées dans des musées des Pays-Bas. Ces photographies avaient été prises entre 1965 et 1986 par les époux Gerti et Noortje Nooter à Tiniteqilaaq, village situé dans le fjord de Sermilik, dans l’est du Groenland. Gerti Nooter, qui était alors conservateur du Musée de La Haye et du Musée National d’Ethnologie de Leiden, avait mené une recherche anthropologique dans cette communauté de chasseurs en pleine transformation. Il y avait pris des photographies et collecté des objets pour les deux musées des Pays-Bas. Le Musée national d’Ethnologie avait entretenu une longue ...