Roots to Reimagining Natural History: Equitable indigenisation and repair in postcolonial natural history and collections practice

Natural history collections are more than repositories of specimens, they are living archives of cultural, scientific, and environmental knowledge. Yet many carry legacies of colonial acquisition and unequal power dynamics that continue to shape access, interpretation, and how knowledge about nature is produced and valued today. Working across two major connected Bristol collections (UoB and BMAG), which together trace over 200 years of natural history knowledge-making in our city, this project explores how material collections can act as sites for revisiting, unearthing, and reclaiming. Our research aims to foster more equitable futures in how natural history is practised, both within and beyond the collection.

Work to address colonial histories in UK natural history collections is relatively recent, emerging with Subhadra Das and Miranda Lowe’s 2018 paper Nature Read in Black and White. This work has since been taken up by practitioners (NatSCA conference papers 2020–25, chaired by Isla Gladstone), yet sector discourse remains largely focused on uncovering colonial links and marginalised voices within existing institutional and disciplinary structures. Sustained, reciprocal collaborations that centre marginalised voices in reimagining more equitable natural history futures remain rare, and where they do exist, they are often individual case studies or arise from cultural, rather than natural science, collection contexts.

Our radically collaborative project model, which grows out of Connections funding, addresses this gap by bringing together three interconnected, practice-based strands within a shared reparative research methodology. Our partnership enables ethically grounded, mutually sustaining, reflective, and genuinely co-produced work—essential for addressing complex colonial legacies that exceed the capacity of any single practitioner or project.

Our research spans natural history collection types (“animal, mineral, vegetable” and archives), institutions (university, museum), practices (creative, academic, museum, community), places (local history, global heritage), and frameworks (policy, education, engagement). This offers sustainable foundations for larger-scale research while maintaining the specificity and scalability of each strand. Each project works through an iterative practice “spiral”: provenance research and interrogation, community consultation and co-production, public sharing, and evaluation.

We aim to develop frameworks and practical tools for working with collections—and within natural history—in ways that prioritise transparency, dialogue, indigenisation, and justice, particularly concerning repatriation and shared stewardship. By engaging communities historically excluded from decision-making, we seek to co-create pathways that respect cultural values while maintaining scientific integrity, extending early case studies for natural history collections (developed by project members between 2022–2025), and bringing new perspectives to established cultural-collection practices (e.g., recent Museums Association spotlight). Exploring equitable processes for digital return is also central as the UK’s new natural science digitisation infrastructure, DiSSCo UK, is established from 2026.

This work is especially timely. The new GCSE in Natural History offers an opportunity to embed these conversations into education, enabling young people to view collections not only as scientific resources but as ethical spaces for collaboration and care. By blending science, humanities, embodied learning, and engagement with source communities, we seek to explore reparative teaching methods, cultivate resilience and agency in the face of ecological crisis, and investigate how people connect with natural history and collections.

At a time when our city has declared an ecological emergency, it is vital to focus public awareness on the natural world around them. The declaration has highlighted the decline of local birds, insects, and mammals, yet our work underscores the crucial role of plants in mutually beneficial inter-species relationships. Rising “plant blindness”—the inability to recognise plants in local environments—coincides with the loss of historic plant knowledge. We aim to help recapture this knowledge and reorient attention toward plants in a city undergoing continual change.

Natural history collections are not just boxes of specimens—they hold stories about science, culture, history and the environment. Some stories are based on thinking and practices during colonial and postcolonial times, meaning that communities knowledge or consent were excluded.

Our project brings together the University of Bristol and Bristol Museums to explore these histories and work with communities to imagine fairer, more inclusive ways of connecting with natural history. We focus on shared research, community collaboration, and practical tools for things like repatriation, stewardship, and digital access.

We also connect this work with education, especially the new GCSE in Natural History, to help young people see collections as places for ethical thinking as well as science. And at a time of ecological crisis, we highlight the importance of reconnecting people with local plants and plant knowledge, which is rapidly being lost.