Linda Kaljundi: North American Indigenous Heritage in Estonian Collections: Emerging Discussions on Entangled Colonial Histories

Estonian museum collections contain many valuable pieces of North American Indigenous
heritage, originally brought to Estonia in the nineteenth century by German-speaking Baltic
elites serving Russian colonial expansion, especially in the Bering Strait region. In recent
years, there has been a growing interest in these objects and their origins, stemming from
global discussions about Indigenous heritage, but also from debates about the amnesia that
has long surrounded the history of Russian colonial expansion. In my talk, I will explore
recent initiatives around Indigenous heritage in Estonia, also drawing on my curatorial
research for the exhibitions Art in the Age of the Anthropocene (2023), Art and Science
(2022), and The Conqueror’s Eye (2019). In highlighting the challenges of these projects, I
also emphasize the potential of thinking through these intertwined and complex histories of
colonialism that connect the Baltic to North America.

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Linda Kaljundi (Estonian Academy of Arts / Fulbright Scholar at MIT) is a historian and curator, Professor of Cultural history at Estonian Academy of Arts and Senior Research Fellow in environmental history at Tallinn University. She holds a PhD from the University of Helsinki. Kaljundi has published on Baltic and Nordic premodern and modern history and historiography, collective memory and nation building, as well as the entangled histories of environment, colonialism and science.