The B.C. government’s commitment to help aboriginal groups retrieve ancestral remains and cultural artifacts adds welcome impetus to an effort that has been going on for many years.
Premier Christy Clark marked National Aboriginal Day on Tuesday by announcing that the government, through the expertise of the Royal B.C. Museum, would work with aboriginal peoples to seek the return of items of spiritual, cultural and historical importance.
Aboriginal peoples have been struggling for decades to retrieve sacred items and remains of their ancestors from museums around the globe. The government’s backing should be of considerable help.
But it won’t be easy to reverse the looting of the cultures of West Coast peoples that took place over 200 years.
It is appropriate for museums and universities to collect artifacts. Such collections expand our knowledge about cultures and history. But those collections should be acquired ethically and legally, and that was often not the case.
Even when items were bought and paid for, the circumstances were often dubious. Clark cited the Yuquot Whalers’ Shrine, taken in 1904 from the Mowachaht/ Muchalaht Nation on Nootka Island and now stored at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
George Hunt, who acquired the shrine for the museum, bought it from two elders who said they had the authority to sell it, but they asked Hunt to wait until the people were off hunting before the shrine was removed, because they feared a backlash.
Many such items sold by individuals were actually communally owned. Sometimes people were coerced to give up the items or were duped. In the relationship between government officials and First Nations people, the officials always had the upper hand.
Missionaries who decried masks, carvings, headdresses and other regalia as pagan and evil were quick to snatch up such items for their own collections.
It isn’t as if those things were relics of extinct civilizations — they were part and parcel of living cultures and beliefs. In many instances, the removal of the artifacts was part of the effort to suppress those cultures.
In 1921, police raided a potlatch (declared illegal by Ottawa in 1884) among the Kwakwaka’wakw people of northeastern Vancouver Island. Those arrested were given a choice: Give up your paraphernalia or stay in jail. The items were supposed to be held in trust, but were scattered through museums and private collections around the world. The Kwakwaka’wakw have spent nearly half a century trying to get those items back.
That doesn’t mean museums should simply empty their shelves of all aboriginal artifacts. Museums are valuable custodians of the past, and should remain so, but as in the case of the Kwakwaka’wakw, the museums can be on traditional territory.
Most museums have policies concerning the return of items, although that shouldn’t automatically include items acquired through legitimate sales. And it takes time to establish ownership and provenance.
It also takes money. Members of the Tseycum First Nation near Patricia Bay raised nearly $150,000 so they could retrieve and rebury the remains of 55 of their ancestors, dug up in the early 20th century and sold to the American Museum of Natural History.
That decade-long effort was led by Cora Jacks, who died in 2008, weeks after the remains of her ancestors were buried. She deserves legendary status, as does Andrea Sanborn, who showed up at the British Museum with an empty Adidas bag and asked for the return of a ceremonial mask, one of the items taken in the Kwakwaka’wakw potlatch raid. She eventually succeeded.
So Clark is a little late to the party, but welcome nonetheless. Some government clout won’t hurt in the repatriation of these valuable components of West Coast cultures.
