On Being Nosy

Wolf Babe is a collective of nêhiyaw, Anishinaabe, and Haudenosaunee artists and curators who currently work at the confluence of Kichi-Sìbì (Ottawa River) and Pasapkedjinawong (Rideau River). While we each have our own individual practices and interests, our Collective emerged from our shared principles of collaboration and mutual respect. In preparing for a recent curatorial project, we spent time with collections in the vault of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, where we encountered rows upon rows and seemingly endless shelves of Indigenous art and material culture. When the museum staff asked how we intended to go about our work, one of our members, Dani Printup, brightly replied, “Oh, we’ll just be nosy—walk through the vault and pull works we want to take a peek at. It’s a methodology.” Dani’s response, both poignant and playful, forms the basis of this essay, where we consider how “being nosy” centers resonant Indigenous intellectual traditions surrounding agency, chance, humour, and care in ways that undermine spaces and mechanisms of oppression.

A nosy methodology counters Western notions of linear time, where relationships with collections are perceived as predictable and driven by human agency alone. Instead, our proposed approach has aimed to align with Indigenous temporalities and worldview, where knowledge unfolds cyclically and relationally through reciprocal connections between many active presences, both human and more-than-human. This perspective acknowledges the understanding that the disclosure of some information is contingent upon the balanced confluence of time, place, and relationship, or perhaps only once a person is prepared to receive it.

So it is the age-old question often heard around gatherings in Indian Country, “Who’s all there?” that forms the crux of this methodology. Although seemingly lighthearted in approach, encoded in this humour is a strategy that recalls family and community gatherings from across Turtle Island, and Indigenous epistemologies that resist institutional containment. When this practice is brought into museum storage, vaults and archives gain the potential to transform into animated spaces of reunion—places to visit old friends and relatives. Yet to become so, institutions have an obligation to welcome and encourage their Native visitors to be nosy. For when it comes to our things now held on museum shelves and drawers, there exists an urgent and deeply genuine interest and need to know, see, feel and sense who’s all there.

In Western culture, being nosy can be viewed as rude, ill-mannered, and impolite; yet, in Native circles, “nosiness” is a common trait of some of the most insightful persons and beings in our communities: young people, aunties, and tricksters. In following their lead, we apply this same method of inquiry to our work. “Being nosy” as methodology is joyful, liberatory work that reasserts and celebrates our sovereignty as Native people—it destabilizes and aims to overturn rigid colonial structures of linearity and categorization and, at the same time, reclaims voices and knowledges that have been chronically overlooked in the historical record.

Traditional museum collection and storage practices have long been critiqued for enforcing a rigid sense of order, with data-driven protocols that Anishinaabe scholar Mikinaak Migwans has referred to as “bureaucratic care.” Our objects are meticulously recorded, catalogued, assigned accession numbers, and placed in designated storage rooms and vaults, places of limited and controlled access where many spend the majority of their remaining lives. This traditional systematic approach to storage, with its clinical aims to classify and preserve, fundamentally contradicts the living nature of our belongings that once moved with their makers. The still, sterile, temperature-controlled environments where they now reside are in stark contrast to the lived experiences these objects once embodied, creating complex and painful ruptures between our belongings, their human relatives, and their original social and cultural contexts. A thunderbird shoulder bag, for example, skillfully ornamented with brightly dyed porcupine quill embroidery and tin cone fringe, was made to hold important articles and to be seen and heard as it once moved with its wearer. It now sits motionless, soundless, unworn, emptied and seemingly suspended in time in a museum collection, apart from its diverse community of relations.

By embracing the natural inclination to be “nosy” in the vault we dream of asserting our agency to feel out this work, and subvert the confines of imposed institutional control. Within these austere and regulated spaces, we hope to reclaim that same deep sense of whimsical curiosity that animated us as children—crouched beneath our family’s kitchen tables playfully listening in on our aunties’ conversations. This pedagogy is centered on an ethos of non-interference, which denotes a high degree of respect and acknowledgement for the agency and independence of others, and is central to many Indigenous understandings of deep relationality and respectful co-presence. Embodying this practice of being nosy in museum and gallery collections, and imagining freedom from the interference of “bureaucratic care” allows us to move more intuitively through institutional structures such as these—spaces that have for generations wanted our things, but not our ways of being, including nosiness.

Offering Native folks greater access to our own histories in museum storage allows for possibilities of the once-overlooked to be seen and sets the concept of intention at the forefront of collections research and care. Indigenous people understand that our material objects remember being part of a complex constellation of relationships, and in forging our own long and winding paths through vaults and storage rooms, sparks of recognition, affect, familiarity, and calls to wonder can more freely emerge, enabling moments where relational ties and insights can unfold according to their own rhythms, rather than through the imposed parameters of object lists and timed scheduled visits.

When Native visitors are given space to be nosy and nomadic across the grid of collections, belongings can be wilful—offering quiet invitations, subtle pulls of your attention, and little tugs at your heart to draw you near—an intuitive call across time and space that is deeply felt. This way of learning is not linear or predictable, it occurs through patient observation, embodied engagement, conversation, and with an openness to the unexpected. In this way, the act of being nosy can become a culturally resonant form of discovery, allowing for a more intuitive, receptive, flexible, and embodied method of exploration in collections and archival research. As many of our tricksters and culture heroes who helped build our worlds have shown, creativity and knowledge emergence or renewal is often a chancy, serendipitous process.

The traditional Western museum and gallery can feel like a place of rules and regulation, where admitted visitors are expected to follow specific codes of behaviour. We are instructed not to touch things, and signs and stanchions tell us where we can and cannot go. We often feel compelled to lower our voices to whispers, or fall silent altogether. The controlled temperature and lighting create an artificial sterility, and scheduled monitored viewings dictate how and when cultural connections can occur. Being nosy transforms this solemn atmosphere of colonial civility and institutional silence and detachment that museums have traditionally imposed on Indigenous persons and their engagement with belongings and replaces it with spontaneous forms of expression: gasps of surprise, shared stories, tears, and bursts of laughter echoing the past lives of objects that were once cared for in their home communities. These unique experiences in collections provoke dialogue and questions like, When was the last time these objects heard the laughter of their Native relatives? and Oh look at that one! I wonder how that was made? In asserting the right to approach collections with a playful and curious spirit of inquiry rather than clinical formality, the act of being nosy brings life-giving spontaneity into vaults and archival rooms originally designed for containment and static preservation. This approach to collections research acknowledges humility, the delightful nature of chance, and the important convergence of time, place, and relationship in considering work with belongings and historical material.