Monday, I sent an e-mail to a museum in Ghana to ask what the Akan name was for a cultural item in the collection where I work. Yesterday, someone was kind enough to send me an e-mail back with the name and an explanation.

I’m a student working in a collection for much less than the the directors and curators and I could get the name of an object from the land where it belongs. It wasn’t difficult at all. Why doesn’t this happen more? Instead, museums and other collecting institutions reduce everything a simple English umbrella term that decontextualizes it. That needs to change.