Looking back on the Repatriation debate
Repatriation, Restitution, Return, Reunification...so much has changed over the past 20 years since I started writing on this topic.
The recently published report by the Working Group on Human Remains in Museum Collections (HRWG) offers the promise of much-needed professional guidance on an issue of growing concern to the international museum community and particularly to UK institutions. This year the report will provide the basis of a consultation document, the results of which will inform the Government's response.
Back in the early 1990s, the practical processes involved in repatriating cultural objects from Western museum collections to their communities of origin were still relatively unexplored. Few, if any, professional guidelines were available for curators to consult.
Finally, following a recommendation in the Museums Association's 1997 report, Museums and Repatriation, the Museums and Galleries Commission commissioned a set of guidelines to provide authoritative advice for governing bodies and museum staff facing requests for repatriation of objects. Restitution and Repatriation: Guidelines for Good Practice, published in February 2000, was the first publication of its kind in Europe to offer impartial, independent advice on preparing a response to a request for the return of cultural property.
These guidelines were designed to address the restitution of cultural objects in general, but it gradually became clear to many in the profession that the repatriation of human remains required different protocols.
Over the past decade the international museum community has accumulated a wealth of knowledge and experience in the repatriation of human remains and sacred objects. Most of this experience has had to be acquired step-by-step by individuals and institutions moving as cautiously and sensitively as possible in uncertain territory, often guided by representatives from the source communities concerned.
Similarly, in the past ten years the source communities themselves have made comparable progress in developing the necessary mechanisms to effect successful repatriation. Diligent archival research has helped to identify objects in western museum collections, better provenance research is helping to establish the correct communities of origin, and cross-cultural liaison is also improving.
A consensus seems to be developing within the international museum community that repatriation — whether of human remains or other sacred objects — is still in its early stages. Furthermore, there is a broad agreement that each case is unique and should be treated on its own merits. For this reason professional guidelines can only provide a broad framework. The real professional learning is coming from a creative dialogue between institutions. Those that documented their experience of repatriation are often willing to share those experiences, acknowledge where procedures could be improved, and to make the necessary adjustments for best practice in the future.
This collegiate atmosphere is important, both in helping to adjust historically entrenched positions and in confronting the challenges inherent in requests for repatriation.
The practical procedures involved in repatriating human remains depend upon the amount, nature and provenance of the material in question, the identity of the community of origin, and the significance of the remains both to that community and to the institution involved.
For example, the ongoing process of repatriation taking place at the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington — which is custodian of one of the largest collections of Native American objects in the world — is quite different from smaller scale acts of repatriation such as that which took place recently at The Manchester Museum in the UK.
Stephanie A. Makseyn-Kelley, Repatriation Program Specialist at the NMAI, says that repatriating from a large federal institution such as hers is a complicated project that requires time, funding and staff. “However, an institution that has those assets might still be tripped up,” says Makseyn-Kelley, “by simply not knowing how to go about determining what they have in their collections in order to summarise, inventory and report them.” The NMAI found that, “the best first steps involved tracking down all the museum records associated with catalogued remains that we could possibly find.”
Transparency is a key issue in building fruitful relationships between museums and cultural groups and sound documentation of collections is crucial to that process. Furthermore it need not always represent an onerous added cost. Many museum directors believe that institutions should anyway be trying to improve their basic housekeeping and documentation and this will, by default, improve repatriation documentation. Posting collections information on the web is a part of that process of transparency and declares that the museum has nothing to hide.
The nature and function of the institution can also colour its policy towards repatriation. The National Museum of the American Indian sees itself as a culture orientated museum and distinguishes itself from natural science orientated museums in that it believes itself to be the steward, rather than the owner, of its native American collections. It therefore sees the management of its collections and the development of its repatriation protocols as a partnership with its Native American constituency.
Partnership and cultural co-operation have quickly become bywords of the developing process of repatriating human remains from UK institutions. As more and more museums take the decision to repatriate human remains and other sacred material, so the network of creative cross-cultural collaboration expands and flourishes. The most enlightened museums now view repatriation not as a loss, or a material diminishment of the collection, but as a positive gain in terms of forming creative links with source communities.
Tristram Besterman, Director of The Manchester Museum, understands better than most the ethical and ideological divide that repatriation can expose, but he also sees the benefits. Dr Besterman, a former convenor of the Museums Association Ethics Committee, was a member of the Working Group on Human Remains. His own museum recently repatriated four human skulls and two limb bones to an Australian Aboriginal community. Besterman believes that a balance has to be struck between the requirements of scientific research and the growing need to address our own sense of accountability to those cultures from which human material was appropriated. “I think re-mapping that territory is what this debate is all about,” says Besterman.
Re-mapping that territory may require museums and source communities to make reciprocal gestures of goodwill. Before handing over its human remains, the Manchester Museum asked the representative from the Foundation for Aboriginal and Islander Research Action (FAIRA) who was acting on behalf of the Aboriginal community, if it might arrange to take detailed measurements of the material so that information could be captured prior to return. “The answer was an unequivocal refusal,” says Besterman. “And that was not negotiable. I could have said, ‘Well that may be your opinion, but I'm going to do it anyway,’ and technically and legally I would have been completely in my rights to do so. But by this time I was building a constructive relationship with the Aboriginal community in Australia and I was very reluctant to do anything that would sour that relationship.”
Besterman says he has learnt from this. “Someone who feels dispossessed is likely to take up an extreme position in order to rectify the balance. And my very strong suspicion is that the nature of the debate will change once some of this material starts going back. Once we stop behaving in an extreme way, then I think other parties will stop behaving in an extreme way and I would attribute a rather uncompromising stance by indigenous communities as being a direct result of an entirely uncompromising and — my words— arrogant position adopted by western museums.”
When the two communities do compromise and co-operate, there are manifold benefits to be reaped, not least being improved cultural liaison into the future. The establishment of deeper relationships needs effort, however. “It’s like any relationship,” says Besterman. “You have to work at it. Certainly as a result of having handed over this material, a warmth and cordiality entered into our discourse with the Aboriginal representatives, and there is an offer now for the development of a collaborative educational programme with an Australian Aboriginal community. That seems to me to be far more culturally enriching than hanging onto a few skulls.”
Len Pole, Curator of Ethnography at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery, Exeter, also sees repatriation as part of a spectrum of relationships with source communities. Exeter has been negotiating to return not only human material but also a necklace and bracelet of iridescent shells associated with Truganini (d.1876), Tasmania’s most famous Aboriginal woman. These are objects of overwhelming cultural importance to the Tasmanian Aboriginal community.
“We should see these negotiations in the more general context of a hopefully continuing and developing relationship between the museum in this country and the source community,” says Pole. “I’d like to think that it establishes a greater degree of trust or a lessening of the kind of antagonism that might have characterised some attitudes. That antagonism might be assuaged by the exchange of information and, where appropriate, the exchange of objects.” When Exeter received the Tasmanian Aboriginal delegation and gave them the two items associated with Truganini, they received items in return. “It wasn’t seen as an exchange as such, but an equivalence of transfer of material. We’ve added two baskets to our collection,” says Pole.
Some Native American tribes have been reluctant to approach the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, fearing that repatriation requires resources and sophistication that they do not possess. “When this happens,” says Stephanie Makseyn-Kelley of the NMAI, “we bend over backwards to reassure them. We offer support to bring them to Washington to meet us, view the collections and discuss the procedures we must follow together and they leave with a feeling of empowerment and optimism. It is so rewarding to bring this about.”
Not all source communities are reluctant to make approaches, however. Australian Aboriginal communities have made huge strides in recent years in developing the necessary apparatus to repatriate human remains. Aboriginal communities have been helped significantly in this regard by Australian Government funding and by the expertise of the Foundation for Aboriginal and Islander Research Action (FAIRA), the community organisation that co-ordinates a repatriation program for ancestral remains and artefacts.
A number of recent English repatriation cases, including the return of human remains from The Manchester Museum and from the Horniman Museum in South London, were co-ordinated by the same FAIRA representative. Many museums assume that the practical procedures of repatriation will be burdensome, but the reality is often that organizations such as FAIRA will absorb most of that responsibility.
Janet Vitmayer, Director of the Horniman Museum, and Finbar Whooley, Curator of Ethnography at the Horniman, say that their recent repatriation of Aboriginal human skulls to the FAIRA delegation was almost entirely unproblematic and cost-free. What is more, the Horniman Museum feels culturally enriched by the event. “People in the local community are interested,” says Vitmayer. “We do get letters about Aboriginal issues and we’re able to write back and show that the trustees care about the subject of repatriation and are being thoughtful and careful about how such matters are conducted.”
The London part of the Horniman repatriation hand-over was a moving experience according to Vitmayer and Whooley. “We briefed staff to treat the occasion as a funeral,” says Whooley, “and as the museum has been used for post-funeral services in the past, we did have an etiquette for it.” Once again, the museum was happy to be led by FAIRA’s needs. The delegates requested some time alone in the designated room to conduct their own private ceremony with the remains and the Horniman was happy to comply. “You need to be able to understand how it fits with a bigger cultural picture in Australia,” says Vitmayer. “FAIRA has been doing detailed research on provenance and how these objects were first collected and so a lot of the initiative on the rituals of repatriation come from the source communities.”
Whooley says that although the Horniman was unable to arrange the requested on-site ‘smoking ceremony’ over its remains, due to fire regulations, the FAIRA representatives were co-operative and instead held a combined ceremony at Manchester to consecrate the three or four institutional repatriations being co-ordinated during that delegation’s visit.
There are still museums and institutional collections that prefer not to draw a firm line between human remains and other sacred objects. Neil Curtis, curator at the Marischal Museum at the University of Aberdeen, points out that not all cultures view human remains as a separate category due to the sacred status attached by some communities to grave goods that are buried with the body.
In July 2003 the Marischal repatriated a sacred horned headdress to the Blood Tribe in Canada. Once again it was treated as a gain rather than a loss. Next year there may be an exchange of objects and this is viewed as part of a long-term relationship with the Blood Tribe.
The Marischal repatriations are conducted within the framework set down in the Restitution and Repatriation: Guidelines for Good Practice published by the Museums and Galleries Commission in 2000. An independent panel also discussed the headdress repatriation.
As a university collection, the Marischal Museum is able to subject its repatriation procedures to the kind of rigorous interdisciplinary inquiry to which conventional museums might not have access. “That sort of debate has great value and we’re terrifically privileged to be able to do that,” says Neil Curtis.
Its attachment to a university also means that it conforms to different administrative procedures. “The recommendations of the Working Group don’t apply in Scotland,” says Curtis, “but I fear they will be imported without discussion. Repatriation is still very much a developing issue and this is one of the reasons for our more complex approach.”
TF
Web Resources
Heading Home: The Burke Museum in Washington Returns Artifacts to Northwest Tribes
http://www.artsci.washington.edu/newsletter/Autumn01/Repatriation.htm
The Report of the Working Group on Human Remains
http://www.culture.gov.uk/global/publications/archive_2003/wgur_report2003.htm
Policy toward sacred objects and human remains at the Marischal Museum at the University of Aberdeen
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/marischal_museum/information/collectingpolicy.hti#Appendix%203
The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA)
http://www.cr.nps.gov/nagpra/
Federal law passed in 1990 which provides a process for museums and Federal agencies to return certain Native American cultural items — human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony - to lineal descendants, culturally affiliated Indian tribes, and Native Hawaiian organizations.
The Foundation for Aboriginal and Islander Research Action (FAIRA)
http://www.faira.org.au/
Brisbane-based community organisation owned and managed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, incorporated in 1977 and which co-ordinates repatriation on behalf of its constituent communities.
National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.
http://www.nmai.si.edu/
A recent text
Laura Peers, Alison K. Brown (Eds.) Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader Routledge, 2003. ISBN: 0415280524
Focusing on museums in North America, the Pacific and the United Kingdom, this test highlights three areas that demonstrate new developments in repatriation: The museum as field site or 'contact zone' - a place which source community members enter for purposes of consultation and collaboration; Visual repatriation - the use of photography to return images of ancestors, historical moments and material heritage to source communities; Specific exhibitions - the implications of cross-cultural and collaborative research for museums, and how such projects have challenged established attitudes and practices.