Repatriating Culture

Museums face complex issues with collections from the early colonial era.

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West Coast Indigenous artist Carey Newman – known for a moving project about the legacy of residential schools, The Witness Blanket – is on a journey that could reconnect his family with a mask that once played an important role in their winter ceremonies. The Nulis mask, named for his family as they were known before colonization, is made of three components, each painted in vibrant colours. The embodiment of one of Newman’s Kwakwak’awakw forebears, the mask would have participated in potlatches, which celebrate community milestones and deal with social, legal and governance issues.

Newman has seen the Nulis mask only once, in 2012, at a German museum, where it was on display – protected, untouchable, out of reach. Meeting it for the first time, he recalls feeling emotionally overwhelmed. “It’s different when it’s your own history and it’s your own meaning,” he says. “It really changed the way I think about that experience of being in a museum.” 

“It’s displayed behind a glass case,” he says. “It has really beautiful lighting and it’s carefully curated for that visual impact.” But what was missing was its cultural context: the explanation about why the mask is important – not just as a ceremonial object but, as Newman explains, the embodiment of an ancestor – a living being with a spirit. 

“The first thing that I felt was being a little bit overwhelmed by, and, I think, taken a bit emotionally by, the moment of getting to meet an ancestor. There’s a lot of power there. And at the same time, I felt this deep sadness that came from the disconnection of it being behind glass.” 

Newman, the University of Victoria’s first impact chair in Indigenous art practices, a position aimed at furthering the university’s efforts toward truth and reconciliation, told this fascinating story during a public webinar, “Unmasking Meaning: Culture, Collection and Family,” in discussion with the German curator now responsible for the mask. 

Newman hopes the mask might someday travel home to Vancouver Island and again be danced at a potlatch – perhaps even with two other more recent versions, one at the UBC Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, and the other residing in his family’s box of treasures. But any decision about a formal request, whether for a visit, or even a permanent return, is something his family must decide collectively. Much will rest on the outcome of his research.

This very personal quest is far from unique. Indigenous communities across Canada – and around the world – are investigating what happened to belongings collected by Europeans in the heyday of colonial expansion. Back then, cultural works were acquired and circulated with little regard for their meaning or purpose. They were often seen as curiosities, rather than vital holders of meaning central to the life of their people. Those who ran the museums may have been interested in the customs, cultural practices and belief systems of these people, but often recorded little information about how items were acquired, whether as gifts, through trade, or by some form of pressure, misrepresentation or even outright theft. 

Some Indigenous communities are asking for belongings to be returned, a process known as repatriation, while others want to negotiate some form of culturally appropriate custodial agreement. Museums everywhere are discussing how to handle these requests and pondering the broader implications for their collections and longstanding museological practices. It is, indeed, an interesting time.

Of course, repatriation covers more than Indigenous belongings. For instance, several high-profile cases have seen looted art from the Holocaust handed back to descendants. And in Regina, the MacKenzie Art Gallery recently returned a stolen sculpture of the Hindu goddess Annapurna to its shrine in India. The museum’s director, John Hampton, said in a year-end interview that a reckoning is brewing around museum collections and who has the right to hold cultural property. “There’s an expectation for accountability,” he says. “This has gone from being a kind gesture to being a necessary one.”

The Nulis mask is in the collection of the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin, sometimes described as the German equivalent of the British Museum. Its journey from Vancouver Island began in the 1880s when Johan Adrian Jacobsen, a Norwegian adventurer, visited the West Coast to collect artifacts for the museum. Over two years, he amassed more than 7,000 pieces. Among them was the mask. Its travels continued with the twists and turns of 20th-century European history. During the Second World War, it was stored in a Berlin bunker. It was then taken to the Soviet city now known as Saint Petersburg, on the Baltic Coast, and later Leipzig in East Germany. After German reunification in 1990, the mask came back to Berlin, where it has resided ever since.

Indigenous world views are putting Eurocentric museological practices, particularly the treatment and care of collections, under a critical scope. For instance, Newman says Kwakwak’awakw masks are allowed to rest when not at a potlatch. “It is wrapped in a blanket, and it’s put away, it’s put to sleep,” he says. But when a mask is on display in a museum, it doesn’t get to rest. “It’s in a permanent state of insomnia.” 

The 2015 report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples are also helping shift institutional attitudes to Indigenous collections in Canada. Nowadays, even the concept of “the museum” can be loaded. Meg Beckel, who heads the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, is one of many museum directors working through the ramifications of how decolonization will happen with respect to their collections. “Owning and accepting why we started as a holder of evidence,” she says, means “recognizing there are ownership issues.” 

Monika Zessnik, the curator of North American collections at Berlin’s Ethnologisches Museum, acknowledges how challenging culturally diverse views can be for museums. “That’s the problem with the Western museum concept,” she said during the webinar, recorded in late January. “This idea of objects being alive, it’s something that wasn’t common. So, if you challenge this now, you have, of course, to challenge the whole idea, at least, of cultural historic museums.”

One of Western Canada’s largest collections of Indigenous art is at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, which houses some 14,000 pieces of Inuit art by about 2,000 artists. Many are carvings that ended up in the hands of buyers in the South by way of the Hudson’s Bay Co., and were later donated to the gallery. Most of these works, which also include textiles and works on paper, have spent much time in storage.

The 2021 opening of Qaumajuq – a 40,000-square-foot Inuit art centre that includes a massive glass storage unit known as a “visible vault” – means some 5,000 works are on permanent view. Darlene Coward Wight, the gallery’s curator of Inuit art, points to a key difference between the Nulis mask and the Inuit collection: the intended purpose of the work. The mask is linked to the life of the community, while Inuit carvings were created specifically for the market. “These things were created to be sold and the families reaped the benefits,” she says. While there may be stories behind specific pieces, they were made to support Northern economies.

With repatriation, one key issue is human remains, which are still found in some museum collections. Last May, the B.C. Museums Association called on publicly funded institutions across Canada to return human remains and burial items to the Nations they were taken from. Unlike the United States, which, since 1990, has required federally funded institutions to return Native American remains, cultural objects and sacred items, Canada has no binding legislation that obligates museums to return important cultural objects to their original communities. Restitutions happen only if all parties agree.

The Canadian Museum of History acknowledges on its website that it has returned human remains to First Nations in several regions of the country. The museum, in Gatineau, Que., across the river from Ottawa, has also returned wampum to the Six Nations Confederacy and medicine bundles to Plains communities. As well, it says it has a custodial agreement with the Nisga’a, on the Northwest Coast, that provides for shared possession, on a rotating basis, of Nisga’a objects in its collection.

Debates about repatriating cultural property are also happening in Europe. In 2018, the New York Times reported on a demonstration that took place at the building site of Berlin’s Humboldt Forum complex, which now houses the Ethnologisches Museum’s exhibitions. Protesters denounced the museum project, which includes the reconstructed baroque façade of a royal palace, citing Germany’s failure to atone for its colonial history. One participant declared “the museum would forever be associated with the blood of empire.” Reporter Graham Bowley wrote: “The prospect of objects gathered during the colonial era moving into Kaiser Wilhelm II’s domain has focused further attention on the period, which the nation has never properly processed. Many of the ethnological materials that will be in the museum’s impressive collection were amassed during that era, under circumstances that aren’t altogether clear.” Since then, Berlin museums trustees have agreed to negotiate the return to Nigeria of the Benin Bronzes, statues and other works thought to be linked to the looting of Benin City by British troops in 1897. 

In the current climate, even traditional museological assumptions about the care of cultural belongings are also in question. For instance, professional staff, who follow established Eurocentric rules, have long been the only people considered qualified to determine an object’s fate. Makers, whose intentions can be quite different, had no say in how objects were maintained. Nor did their home communities.

Newman says Kwakwak’awakw ceremonial masks have a natural lifespan, just as all living beings eventually reach their end. It’s a cultural understanding that flies in the face of museological goals to ensure pieces in an institution’s care never perish. Such conflicting philosophies raise another issue for Newman: what the museum may have done to the Nulis mask in the name of conservation. He says a curator has told him toxins were used to preserve the wood, making it untouchable – and unable to be danced. “What happens,” he wondered during the webinar, “to the spirit of a thing, if, in the process of saving the wood, the paint, the bark, the skin that it’s made from, you poison it?” Zessnik, who expressed an interest in continued dialogue, has promised to run tests to determine if the mask was, indeed, contaminated during its time overseas.

Finding ways to resolve the complex issues that can surface when world views collide will be necessary if decolonization is to move forward in the cultural and heritage sector. For his part, Newman has already been involved in one innovative solution: how to protect The Witness Blanket, an installation made from some 800 items collected from various residential school sites and survivors that is now housed at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg. 

He helped develop a unique 2019 agreement combining Indigenous concepts and Western legal principles that saw legal rights vested with the blanket itself as a living entity that honours the stories of survivors. “We were not negotiating against each other but collaborating together in the best interest of the blanket itself,” Newman said at the time. “We didn’t want to treat it like a transfer of property because I don’t feel ownership of the blanket, I feel responsibility towards it, and I wanted to make sure the museum felt this too.”

Today, with greater awareness of Indigenous rights and the need to address the wrongs of the past, many critical questions face museums, not least among them: Do institutions have a right to ownership of important objects from other cultures, particularly if, as in the case of the Nulis mask, it’s something considered to be a living being? Since the Nulis mask is heralded by its community as an essential family member, the ethical move – as with human remains – would be to return it, if that’s what the Newman family wants, even if considerable resources have been invested in its upkeep. 

By the same token, if repatriation requests multiply there are obvious implications for collections and the institutions that have used them for both historical research and to inform and educate audiences about the diversity of human culture and the world’s evolving web of histories. The handling of such social justice and cultural issues will reveal much about the potential for deeper understanding, cooperation and reconciliation as we move forward.  ■

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