Repatriation of indigenous artefacts a hot topic for museums

Museums are rethinking their approach to indigenous collections and custodianship in the wake of repatriation laws.

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In the early 1990s, a climate of fear and ­anxiety — as palpable as any fast-moving weather front — closed in on some of America’s leading museums. With a poetic flourish, pioneering museum director Rick West says of this extraordinarily tense period: “I thought they [museum directors and curators] could almost literally hear in their minds the quiet rumble of 18 wheelers at the back bay doors of their museums, just waiting to haul it all away.”

West — the founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington — is describing cultural institutions’ panicky reaction to far-reaching US repatriation laws. Introduced in 1989-90, these laws deemed that Native American human remains, sacred and funerary objects and items of cultural patrimony in federally funded museum collections had to be returned to their originating communities on request (provided the claims were genuine).

Prominent gallery and museum directors and curators wrongly assumed the new legislation would decimate their collections, West recalls in a phone interview.

In fact, some cultural institutions considered “suing in court to try to get the law declared ­unconstitutional. It was an indication of just how upset museums were about this legislation,’’ he says.

West is visiting Australia this week to give a keynote address at a National Museum of Australia conference on the vexed question of indigenous collections and colonial legacies. Now director of Los Angeles’s Autry Museum of the American West, founded by Hollywood’s “singing cowboy” Gene Autry, West is a youthful 73-year-old who likes to joke that he is “grossly flunking” retirement.

The museological innovator, who is of southern Cheyenne heritage, considers the NMA conference to be of “international significance’’. Inspired by the Canberra museum’s current Encounters exhibition — which displays many rare Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander treasures from the British Museum’s collections for the first time in Australia since they were collected — the conference will also focus on how a new, more inclusive paradigm is transforming relationships between indigenous peoples and museums across the world. Indigenous people are now far more likely to have requests for the return of human remains and sacred materials met unopposed; to be employed by museums; and to have their voices represented in exhibitions. Some communities, meanwhile, have established their own “keeping places” and cultural centres for repatriated material.

Titled New Encounters, the conference has drawn experts from Britain, Scandinavia, the US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. They will explore how museums are rethinking their approach to indigenous collections and custodianship, as well as the more sharply contested domains mentioned above.

A quarter of a century after the US congress passed its repatriation laws, thousands of Native American remains and more than 1.4 million objects have been repatriated, and few, if any, of the dire predictions (or the legal threats) have come to pass.

“They really have not,’’ reiterates West. “Our collections have not been decimated.’’

Nevertheless, these laws have not been without conflict. Last month, The New York Times reported how Kumeyaay tribes from California won the right to claim ownership of rare skeletons dating back about 9500 years and discovered by the University of California. Three of the university’s scientists had taken their employer to court in a bid to stop the university handing back the remains. The scientists argued DNA evidence from the skeletons — discovered on university land — would be vital in helping to piece together North America’s deep past. The scientists lost in court, however, and declared the decision “a tremendous loss for science’’. (The victorious Kumeyaay have yet to decide whether they will allow the skeletons to be studied.)

This case demonstrates how repatriation programs and laws, combined with a new ethos of inclusiveness, have fundamentally shifted the balance of power between those on the inside of cultural institutions and those on the margins: indigenous peoples whose wishes and demands were, in the past, frequently ignored.

West has likened traditional museums to “a temple with a self-governing priesthood’’; and he has said of those critics who oppose museums’ more inclusive approach: “These intellectuals already have lost this pitched cultural and intellectual battle and they know it, however much they protest, pretend and resist.’’ He will address this issue further in his Canberra talk. Some archeologists and scientists worry, however, that their work is being impeded by the American repatriation laws, while certain tribes have found it difficult and costly to prove their links to contested artefacts and remains.

What about local museums’ engagement with the First Australians? Have things improved since Aboriginal heritage activist Henrietta Marrie complained in a 1992 paper: “The current situation regarding our heritage is a mess’’? Margo Neale, an NMA indigenous curator who has organised the conference, says that since the 1970s, reforms at Australian museums and galleries have been “massive”. She mentions the employment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff (including the NMA’s inaugural director Dawn Casey, another conference speaker); the voluntary return of scores of indigenous remains and secret sacred items; and the inclusion of indigenous voices in exhibitions such as Encounters, which she regards as “one of the bravest exhibitions mounted in this country”.

In Australia, unlike the US, there are no federal laws compelling cultural institutions to repatriate indigenous remains or objects. Even so, Neale maintains “Australia is leading the way in practice and policies, if not law”. For example, under the government-funded lndigenous Repatriation Program, major museums including the NMA, the Australian Museum, Museum Victoria and Western Australian Museum collaborate with governments to return ancestral remains and sacred objects to their communities of origin.

According to Neale, museums have also helped native title claimants prove their unbroken cultural connection to claimed lands.

She points out repatriation doesn’t necessarily mean objects (she prefers the term “belongings”) are handed back; some clans have asked museums to keep looking after their treasures, provided they can access them. “lt’s a kind of joint custodianship,” she says. On the other hand, in 2010 a traditional carved tree held by the Museum of Victoria was returned to the Gamilaroi people of northern NSW after it was shown to have come from an ancestral grave­site. “All of these transactions occurred as part of the repatriation process,” explains Neale.

This flexible process is a far cry from the experiences of the academic’s family before the 70s. She says of her extended family: “We wouldn’t go near museums in a fit. We didn’t visit art galleries either.’’ This reaction was a result of her family’s “natural instinct against authority”, she says with a chuckle. But it also reflected how her relatives saw museums as “mortuaries”, given their large collections of indigenous remains.

Museums have traditionally feared the R-word. But in the 21st century, even when cultural institutions wholeheartedly embrace repatriation, the road home can be bumpy. ln Norway, in perhaps the most radical repatriation scheme yet seen, the Norsk Folkemuseum and Kulturhistorisk Museum have offered to give back half of their Sami collections to the nation’s indigenous Sami people.

Anne May Olli, director of the Riddo Duottar Museat in northeastern Norway, says of this unexpected move: “They feel it is the ethical thing to do.” But there are significant obstacles to the project, called Baastede, going ahead. The first (and most predictable) hurdle is funding. According to Olli, who will also address the Canberra conference, the objects will be returned only if the Sami museums have appropriate storage facilities to house them. But neither the museums nor the Sami parliament, which advises the national government, has the funds to build such facilities.

Also problematic is the fact that organic Sami artefacts have been preserved with chemicals and pesticides that the more recently built Sami museums consider harmful. “There are a lot of challenges we need to figure out,” says Olli. “lt’s really good we have got repat­riation, but it’s also given us some challenges.”

If repatriation is at one end of this often charged debate, the idea of the universal ­museum — one that claims to represent the world’s cultures under one roof — is at the other. Intriguingly, West and another conference delegate, indigenous Canadian artist and academic David Garneau, both oppose the idea of the universal museum — which is exactly how the British Museum, the main source of artefacts for the Encounters show, defines itself.

Says West: “When you’re talking about material that is associated with living contemporary communities, the proposition can be very painful. The universal museum is based upon the notion that we have come to a point where somehow cultural material that might be in museums really belongs to everyone. It somehow transcends [the notion of] belonging to communities.’’ While Garneau agrees relations between museums and indigenous people in Canada have improved immensely since the late 1980s, he adds: “Clearly [universal] museums are still part of the colonial enterprise from an indigenous point of view.’’

Nevertheless, the new order has encouraged more honest debate about how many indigenous artefacts were collected in far-from-ethical circumstances — through grave robbing, for instance, or in the aftermath of frontier violence. The US repatriation law was created, in part, to atone for bad history: in the 19th century many Native American graves were plundered, with stolen human remains and grave goods often ending up in cultural institutions. West says “the imperative behind the return of human remains was outright morality. It was the right thing to do. In my own tribe, the southern Cheyenne, hundreds of remains were swept from the battlefield in the 19th century by the US army and packed off to Washington, DC.’’ He says relations between US institutions and native tribes have improved dramatically because of the repatriation drive there.

Even the most symbolically powerful item in Encounters — a Gweagal shield Captain James Cook’s crew collected at Botany Bay in 1770 — was taken after an act of violence. (Cook’s landing party had shot at two Aboriginal men who had resisted his party’s landing, wounding one of them.)

Garneau has seen Encounters. While he says it is “pretty terrific’’, he also believes it is “very fraught’’ for those who would like their ancestral artefacts to be repatriated from the British Museum. (As previously reported by The Australian, some indigenous communities want their ancestral treasures handed back permanently, while others are pleased to see their culture represented in a London museum with a huge international audience.) Garneau adds, though, that the consultation process involving 27 communities — the biggest in the NMA’s history — “is better than anything we have seen in Canada’’.

He says ties between Canadian museums and indigenous tribes have evolved from “consultation to really complex engagement’’. For instance, at Vancouver’s Museum of Anthropology, a native Canadian anthropologist recently curated a major exhibition but chose to ignore the 40,000 artefacts in the museum’s collection. Instead, he focused on objects taken directly from, or created by, his own community.

Still, for Garneau, the ultimate test of this new spirit of engagement is this: Are more indigenous people attending museums? “If indigenous people aren’t going in to see their things, what have we achieved?’’ he asks pointedly. He is co-curating an exhibition that opens next month at Campbelltown on Sydney’s outskirts, which will commemorate the 200th anniversary of the region’s Appin massacre.

West also has a strong working knowledge of Australia. When he started leading the National Museum of the American Indian (he stepped down from that role in 2007), he looked to Australia and New Zealand “to see how museums were dealing with these questions of representing, interpreting, handling the cultural patrimony of indigenous peoples’’. While wary of becoming “entangled’’ in domestic politics, he observes that Australia has taken steps forward but slid back on some issues to do with repatriation and indigenous engagement “because this is contested territory we’re talking about … [but] Australia has been a very, very important laboratory, just as the US has been, in trying to figure out these difficult questions’’.

The lawyer turned museum supremo used to argue that indigenous communities had a love-hate relationship with museums, though he thinks this has become “less true’’: “I think that was true until only very recently. We’ve loved museums in one sense, because that’s where all of our stuff was. But we’ve disliked museums for the very same reason — our stuff was in museums and not with us’’. Clearly, this sense of cultural alienation is undergoing rapid change, on both sides of the Pacific.

New Encounters, Wednesday-Friday, National Museum of Australia, Canberra.