Museums Urged to Return Indigenous Remains and Relics

What's the story?

• During centuries of global colonial expansion, settlers looted Indigenous remains, funerary objects, and cultural artifacts as part of campaigns of cultural genocide. Many countries are returning these artifacts as part of a process of historical reckoning.
• Many museums and institutions globally continue to possess and display these artifacts despite calls to return them to their rightful nations or tribes. 

European repatriations

• The British Museum made an estimated 4.3 million pounds during 2019-2020 from its vast collections of colonial-era artifacts. A 2018 report by the French government found that approximately 90% of Africa's cultural artifacts are located in the major museum collections of the West. 
• Dutch museums are returning 478 cultural objects looted during colonial activity in Sri Lanka and Indonesia. A Berlin museum is returning hundreds of skulls from the former colony of East Africa. In 2021, France returned altars and statues to Benin in West Africa.
• The British Museum in London has refused to repatriate some of its most famous items, like the Rosetta Stone and marble statues from Ancient Greece.
• Chika Okeke-Agulu, a professor at Princeton University, said:

"They cannot play the ostrich, they have to face up [to] the reality and be on the right side of history."

The North American context

• The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles returned three terra cotta figures to Italy, and the Smithsonian Institution returned 29 Benin bronzes to Nigeria, but progress on repatriating Indigenous remains and artifacts is slow. In the U.S., remains were supposed to be returned following the passage of the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
• James Riding In, a member of the Pawnee tribe and former professor, said: 

"We never ceded or relinquished our dead. They were stolen."

• A ProPublica investigation found that 10 institutions hold roughly half of unreturned Native American remains. Two are arms of the U.S. government: the Interior Department and the Tennessee Valley Authority. The Interior Department says they are not required to return the remains unless a band or tribe makes a formal request.
• Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and the University of California, Berkeley, each hold the remains of more than 1,000 Native Americans.
• In Canada, a draft of the Aboriginal Cultural Property Repatriation Act calls on the government to develop a strategy for returning remains and cultural items that were often stolen, confiscated, or sold under duress. The legislation is stalled in the Senate, and approximately 6.7 million belongings remain in the hands of museums and institutions.
• Activists argue that settler ownership of Indigenous items is a form of assimilation designed to extinguish Indigenous culture and relegate them to museum curiosities.

Criticisms

• Some critics argue that it can be difficult to assert definitive ownership over artifacts with ambiguous origins and that collections built up over time are being randomly depleted.

Do you support repatriations?

—Emma Kansiz 

(Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons)