UK museums are unnecessarily hostile to repatriation claimants. This was the feeling of some of the delegates at an international conference on restitution held at the University of Manchester in July.
Tristram Besterman, an adviser on repatriation claims and a former convener of the Museums Association’s ethics committee, says the language and tone of the criteria used by some museums to assess claims “speak not of a welcome for a respected partner, but of the need to repel an unwanted invader”.
He adds that communities see the museum decision-making processes as “white man’s rules” that need to be challenged.
It is common in the UK for individual museums to set their own criteria against which they then assess repatriation claims.
But claimants say this isn’t a fair process as it makes the museum both judge and jury. Elena Korka, of the Greek culture ministry, says the burden of proof weighs heavily on the shoulders of the claimant and that, for many, making a repatriation claim is unaffordable as the costs can be “blood draining”.
Besterman would prefer a system where the onus of proof is shifted from the claimant having to justify “why?” to the museum having to justify “why not?”.
Claimants can find museums puzzlingly inconsistent in their rulings. One problem is that a museum’s attitude to repatriation can be strongly influenced by the personal values of senior individuals.
Neil Curtis, senior curator at the Marischal Museum in Aberdeen, points out that just a few years before Glasgow Museums’ much-praised 1998 agreement to return a Sioux ghost dance shirt, it had refused to do so under a previous director.
The Marischal Museum has returned some items to source communities and its criteria avoid talking negatively of the ‘fate’ of items if they are returned, instead considering the ‘consequences’ of both return and retention.
But some argue that it might be best not to have criteria at all. Piotr Bienkowski, a museum consultant who used to work at Manchester Museum, says UK museums’ current systems for addressing repatriation cases are “bureaucratic and adversarial”.
He argues that they undermine what he sees as the central role of museums to “use collections to foster understanding between cultures and communities”. He would like to see museums adopt a form of “deliberative democracy” that would bring together all those with an interest in the collection in open and respectful dialogue.
Jonathan King, keeper of the department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the British Museum, argues that the museum has built strong and successful international relationships.
He says problems appear when “a very difficult and complex history gets rendered in black and white terms”. In these cases, claimants and museums argue about the ownership of objects, often with the involvement of politicians or the media, which can make agreement less likely.
However, a good relationship between a museum and a source community makes progress possible. King played a key part in the British Museum’s long loan of a transformation mask to the U’mista Cultural Society in British Columbia, Canada, in 2005. The loan is initially for nine years, which, under current legislation, is as close as a UK national museum can get to returning an artefact.
Andrea Sanborn, the executive director of the U’mista Cultural Society, has written about the importance of the return of sacred items such as the transformation mask:
“We can only imagine the distress carried by the spirit of the transformation mask while it was separated from the spirit of its culture… The very soul of our culture remains fragmented until all the pieces can be reunited… We thank museums for caring for our treasures, but now is the time to send them home.”
Eeva-Kristiina Harlin, a curator at the RiddoDuottarMuseat, the Norwegian Sami museum, holds similar views. The Sami are described as the only indigenous people in Europe and live in an area covering parts of modern-day Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. Many older Sami artefacts are in museums outside Sami lands, some of it collected as late as the 1950s.
Staff at RiddoDuottarMuseat are discussing repatriation with other museums. Harlin says it is important to get the oldest and rarest objects home. “The right to administer one’s own heritage is the right to one’s past.”
Harlin spoke at the conference in Manchester with her colleague Anne May Olli, a conservator at RiddoDuottarMuseat. They explained that the Sami people have a strong political will to accomplish return, but there are unresolved practical and conservation problems. These include other museums treating some objects with the pesticide DDT, so they are now too dangerous to handle.
The conference also heard that it is now common practice for museums to return items to indigenous communities within countries such as Australia and the US. It has become normal for UK museums to return human remains to former colonies.
But there are remarkably few returns of artefacts between countries. Elena Korka tracks all international returns of objects and human remains and she says that there have never been more than 15 in a single year.
In some cases communities calling for restitution do not necessarily want objects returned to them. What they do want is acknowledgement of past wrongs and a stake in how objects from their culture are researched and interpreted.
Conal McCarthy, the director of Victoria University’s museum and heritage studies programme in New Zealand, is to publish a book next year on museums and source communities (see box below).
He says that in New Zealand some indigenous people, particularly younger ones, are more interested in the knowledge connected to an object. For many of them, it can be more important to find a way of ensuring their community’s worldview is articulated than going all out to get objects returned.
Museum and academic projects to share the process of research and interpretation with source communities are often referred to as ‘digital repatriation’ or ‘knowledge restitution’ projects.
Many of these are webbased, such as the Reciprocal Research Network, which aims to reconnect traditional knowledge with museum collections from the Northwest coast of British Columbia (see box below).
Organisations representing three Canadian First Nations communities play a major part in leading the network, which brings together the collections of 15 museums, including two in the UK: the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Staff at the Pitt Rivers have extensive experience in building close relationships with indigenous peoples to enable knowledge sharing.
A current project has seen the loan of five Blackfoot shirts to museums in Blackfoot territory in southern Alberta, including handling sessions for over 500 Blackfoot people.
Laura Peers, curator of the Americas at the Pitt Rivers, says the Blackfoot people see the shirts as “returning warriors” that embody ancestors. To the Blackfoot, the return of the shirts is comparable to the return of prisoners of war. But this type of work is expensive. In addition to staff costs, the loan of five shirts cost £27,000 for crates, insurance and transport.
And Peers recognises that the Blackfoot will not necessarily be satisfied with a loan of the shirts. She says that at every handling session someone has said to her: “These should come home for good.”
Not all digital repatriation projects are successful. Peers defines restitution as “to give back; to compensate” and says some of these projects fail to achieve that. “It’s the politics of funding; these words look good on a grant application.”
She says communities complain when projects fail to build relationships and include enough dialogue. “This is neither repatriation nor restitution, it is simply access, something museums are supposed to do as part of their core definition,” she says.
When a museum and a source community understand each other, restitution changes from an adversarial claim to a discussion based on mutual respect.
As UK museums build stronger relationships with communities in former colonies, it could be that for potential claimants a respectful relationship is enough in itself and permanent physical return of artefacts no longer seems so important. On the other hand, when a museum understands a community better, it is likely to become more willing to return things.
If UK museums are able to continue to build strong relationships with source communities then there are likely to be less headline-grabbing, high-profile claims for return, but more artefacts might be returned.
International relationship building is expensive and time-consuming. It requires staff and funding, and in the current spending squeeze it is possible that cuts could set the clock back, put museums on the defensive and inadvertently bring a return to conflict.
Maurice Davies is head of policy and communication at the Museums Association.
For more on July's restitution conference, click here
The Reciprocal Research Network (RRN) provides an online research environment for geographically dispersed users to access diverse museum collections of the Northwest Coast and British Columbia.
The goals are to reconnect objects, people, land, languages and traditions that are culturally and historically significant to First Nations communities and to create a collaborative, environment in which to explore collections of their cultural heritage held by museums.
The development of the RRN brings together First Nations communities, international cultural institutions and individual researchers.
The Musqueam Indian Band, the Stó:lo Nation/Tribal Council, the U’mista Cultural Society and the Museum of Anthropology are the co-developers.
The partners include the Royal British Columbia Museum; the Burke Museum; the Laboratory of Archaeology at the University of British Columbia; the Glenbow; the Royal Ontario Museum; the McCord Museum; the National Museum of the American Indian; the American Museum of Natural History; the Pitt Rivers Museum; and the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
Through the RRN, First Nations are able to view and research cultural items from their own perspectives and add their own knowledge. In this way, the RRN represents a shift in the way research into cultural heritage is conducted.
Ulrike Radermacher is an RRN coordinator and associate professor at the department of anthropology, University of British Columbia, Canada, www.rrnpilot.org
Next year Te Papa Press will publish his book Museums and Maori, which will look at how professionals deal with indigenous objects in museums and how they engage on a practical level with indigenous communities. It follows his Exhibiting Maori: A History of Colonial Cultures of Display, which was published by Berg in 2007.
McCarthy says there has been a lot of international interest in issues such as cultural property, representation and the politics of display, but less work on museums and source communities that is grounded in current museum practice and includes the voices of indigenous people themselves. He hopes Museums and Maori will address this.
The book is based on interviews with the indigenous professionals and community representatives involved with the transformation of New Zealand museum practice in the past three decades.
Since the 1970s, museums in New Zealand have explored a range of new ways of collecting, caring for and exhibiting the taonga Maori (treasures) of the Maori people in partnership with iwi (tribes). New Zealand’s once-monocultural museums were transformed into avowedly bicultural institutions with the famous Te Maori exhibition (1984-87).
In recent years they have changed again with pressures from tribal development and from the new museology. Now, indigenous professionals, along with their colleagues, are exploring ways in which Maori as a “nation within” can manage their own heritage, either inside or outside the walls of museums.
Conal McCarthy is the director of Victoria University’s museum and heritage studies programme in New Zealand.
Stone of Destiny
Westminster Abbey, London, to Edinburgh Castle, 1996
Lakota ghost dance shirt
Glasgow Museums to Wounded Knee Survivors Association, South Dakota, US, 1999
Axum Obelisk
Rome, Italy, to Aksum, Ethiopia, 2005
Kwakwaka’wakw transformation mask
British Museum, London, to U’mista Cultural Society, British Columbia, Canada (long loan), 2005
Parthenon marble fragment
University of Heidelberg to Acropolis Museum, Athens, 2006 (and another fragment on loan from the Vatican, 2008)
Image: Hei tiki (pendants in human form) are the best-known Maori adornment. New Zealand's museums have pioneered knowledge restitution projects with the country's indigenous population
Tristram Besterman, an adviser on repatriation claims and a former convener of the Museums Association’s ethics committee, says the language and tone of the criteria used by some museums to assess claims “speak not of a welcome for a respected partner, but of the need to repel an unwanted invader”.
He adds that communities see the museum decision-making processes as “white man’s rules” that need to be challenged.
It is common in the UK for individual museums to set their own criteria against which they then assess repatriation claims.
But claimants say this isn’t a fair process as it makes the museum both judge and jury. Elena Korka, of the Greek culture ministry, says the burden of proof weighs heavily on the shoulders of the claimant and that, for many, making a repatriation claim is unaffordable as the costs can be “blood draining”.
Besterman would prefer a system where the onus of proof is shifted from the claimant having to justify “why?” to the museum having to justify “why not?”.
Claimants can find museums puzzlingly inconsistent in their rulings. One problem is that a museum’s attitude to repatriation can be strongly influenced by the personal values of senior individuals.
Neil Curtis, senior curator at the Marischal Museum in Aberdeen, points out that just a few years before Glasgow Museums’ much-praised 1998 agreement to return a Sioux ghost dance shirt, it had refused to do so under a previous director.
The Marischal Museum has returned some items to source communities and its criteria avoid talking negatively of the ‘fate’ of items if they are returned, instead considering the ‘consequences’ of both return and retention.
But some argue that it might be best not to have criteria at all. Piotr Bienkowski, a museum consultant who used to work at Manchester Museum, says UK museums’ current systems for addressing repatriation cases are “bureaucratic and adversarial”.
He argues that they undermine what he sees as the central role of museums to “use collections to foster understanding between cultures and communities”. He would like to see museums adopt a form of “deliberative democracy” that would bring together all those with an interest in the collection in open and respectful dialogue.
Jonathan King, keeper of the department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the British Museum, argues that the museum has built strong and successful international relationships.
He says problems appear when “a very difficult and complex history gets rendered in black and white terms”. In these cases, claimants and museums argue about the ownership of objects, often with the involvement of politicians or the media, which can make agreement less likely.
However, a good relationship between a museum and a source community makes progress possible. King played a key part in the British Museum’s long loan of a transformation mask to the U’mista Cultural Society in British Columbia, Canada, in 2005. The loan is initially for nine years, which, under current legislation, is as close as a UK national museum can get to returning an artefact.
Andrea Sanborn, the executive director of the U’mista Cultural Society, has written about the importance of the return of sacred items such as the transformation mask:
“We can only imagine the distress carried by the spirit of the transformation mask while it was separated from the spirit of its culture… The very soul of our culture remains fragmented until all the pieces can be reunited… We thank museums for caring for our treasures, but now is the time to send them home.”
Eeva-Kristiina Harlin, a curator at the RiddoDuottarMuseat, the Norwegian Sami museum, holds similar views. The Sami are described as the only indigenous people in Europe and live in an area covering parts of modern-day Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. Many older Sami artefacts are in museums outside Sami lands, some of it collected as late as the 1950s.
Staff at RiddoDuottarMuseat are discussing repatriation with other museums. Harlin says it is important to get the oldest and rarest objects home. “The right to administer one’s own heritage is the right to one’s past.”
Harlin spoke at the conference in Manchester with her colleague Anne May Olli, a conservator at RiddoDuottarMuseat. They explained that the Sami people have a strong political will to accomplish return, but there are unresolved practical and conservation problems. These include other museums treating some objects with the pesticide DDT, so they are now too dangerous to handle.
The conference also heard that it is now common practice for museums to return items to indigenous communities within countries such as Australia and the US. It has become normal for UK museums to return human remains to former colonies.
But there are remarkably few returns of artefacts between countries. Elena Korka tracks all international returns of objects and human remains and she says that there have never been more than 15 in a single year.
In some cases communities calling for restitution do not necessarily want objects returned to them. What they do want is acknowledgement of past wrongs and a stake in how objects from their culture are researched and interpreted.
Conal McCarthy, the director of Victoria University’s museum and heritage studies programme in New Zealand, is to publish a book next year on museums and source communities (see box below).
He says that in New Zealand some indigenous people, particularly younger ones, are more interested in the knowledge connected to an object. For many of them, it can be more important to find a way of ensuring their community’s worldview is articulated than going all out to get objects returned.
Museum and academic projects to share the process of research and interpretation with source communities are often referred to as ‘digital repatriation’ or ‘knowledge restitution’ projects.
Many of these are webbased, such as the Reciprocal Research Network, which aims to reconnect traditional knowledge with museum collections from the Northwest coast of British Columbia (see box below).
Organisations representing three Canadian First Nations communities play a major part in leading the network, which brings together the collections of 15 museums, including two in the UK: the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Staff at the Pitt Rivers have extensive experience in building close relationships with indigenous peoples to enable knowledge sharing.
A current project has seen the loan of five Blackfoot shirts to museums in Blackfoot territory in southern Alberta, including handling sessions for over 500 Blackfoot people.
Laura Peers, curator of the Americas at the Pitt Rivers, says the Blackfoot people see the shirts as “returning warriors” that embody ancestors. To the Blackfoot, the return of the shirts is comparable to the return of prisoners of war. But this type of work is expensive. In addition to staff costs, the loan of five shirts cost £27,000 for crates, insurance and transport.
And Peers recognises that the Blackfoot will not necessarily be satisfied with a loan of the shirts. She says that at every handling session someone has said to her: “These should come home for good.”
Not all digital repatriation projects are successful. Peers defines restitution as “to give back; to compensate” and says some of these projects fail to achieve that. “It’s the politics of funding; these words look good on a grant application.”
She says communities complain when projects fail to build relationships and include enough dialogue. “This is neither repatriation nor restitution, it is simply access, something museums are supposed to do as part of their core definition,” she says.
When a museum and a source community understand each other, restitution changes from an adversarial claim to a discussion based on mutual respect.
As UK museums build stronger relationships with communities in former colonies, it could be that for potential claimants a respectful relationship is enough in itself and permanent physical return of artefacts no longer seems so important. On the other hand, when a museum understands a community better, it is likely to become more willing to return things.
If UK museums are able to continue to build strong relationships with source communities then there are likely to be less headline-grabbing, high-profile claims for return, but more artefacts might be returned.
International relationship building is expensive and time-consuming. It requires staff and funding, and in the current spending squeeze it is possible that cuts could set the clock back, put museums on the defensive and inadvertently bring a return to conflict.
Maurice Davies is head of policy and communication at the Museums Association.
For more on July's restitution conference, click here
Reconnecting artefacts with people
The Reciprocal Research Network (RRN) provides an online research environment for geographically dispersed users to access diverse museum collections of the Northwest Coast and British Columbia.
The goals are to reconnect objects, people, land, languages and traditions that are culturally and historically significant to First Nations communities and to create a collaborative, environment in which to explore collections of their cultural heritage held by museums.
The development of the RRN brings together First Nations communities, international cultural institutions and individual researchers.
The Musqueam Indian Band, the Stó:lo Nation/Tribal Council, the U’mista Cultural Society and the Museum of Anthropology are the co-developers.
The partners include the Royal British Columbia Museum; the Burke Museum; the Laboratory of Archaeology at the University of British Columbia; the Glenbow; the Royal Ontario Museum; the McCord Museum; the National Museum of the American Indian; the American Museum of Natural History; the Pitt Rivers Museum; and the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
Through the RRN, First Nations are able to view and research cultural items from their own perspectives and add their own knowledge. In this way, the RRN represents a shift in the way research into cultural heritage is conducted.
Ulrike Radermacher is an RRN coordinator and associate professor at the department of anthropology, University of British Columbia, Canada, www.rrnpilot.org
“A nation within”
Next year Te Papa Press will publish his book Museums and Maori, which will look at how professionals deal with indigenous objects in museums and how they engage on a practical level with indigenous communities. It follows his Exhibiting Maori: A History of Colonial Cultures of Display, which was published by Berg in 2007.
McCarthy says there has been a lot of international interest in issues such as cultural property, representation and the politics of display, but less work on museums and source communities that is grounded in current museum practice and includes the voices of indigenous people themselves. He hopes Museums and Maori will address this.
The book is based on interviews with the indigenous professionals and community representatives involved with the transformation of New Zealand museum practice in the past three decades.
Since the 1970s, museums in New Zealand have explored a range of new ways of collecting, caring for and exhibiting the taonga Maori (treasures) of the Maori people in partnership with iwi (tribes). New Zealand’s once-monocultural museums were transformed into avowedly bicultural institutions with the famous Te Maori exhibition (1984-87).
In recent years they have changed again with pressures from tribal development and from the new museology. Now, indigenous professionals, along with their colleagues, are exploring ways in which Maori as a “nation within” can manage their own heritage, either inside or outside the walls of museums.
Conal McCarthy is the director of Victoria University’s museum and heritage studies programme in New Zealand.
Five significant restitutions
Stone of Destiny
Westminster Abbey, London, to Edinburgh Castle, 1996
Lakota ghost dance shirt
Glasgow Museums to Wounded Knee Survivors Association, South Dakota, US, 1999
Axum Obelisk
Rome, Italy, to Aksum, Ethiopia, 2005
Kwakwaka’wakw transformation mask
British Museum, London, to U’mista Cultural Society, British Columbia, Canada (long loan), 2005
Parthenon marble fragment
University of Heidelberg to Acropolis Museum, Athens, 2006 (and another fragment on loan from the Vatican, 2008)
Image: Hei tiki (pendants in human form) are the best-known Maori adornment. New Zealand's museums have pioneered knowledge restitution projects with the country's indigenous population