Denver Post: “We shouldn’t be curating people’s souls:” Denver museum repatriates sacred carvings to Kenyan tribes. “At the Denver museum, the discovery of 30 wooden statues sent curators on a quest to return the items said to hold the souls of ancestors. For the Mijikenda people in Kenya and northern Tanzania, the carvings — long rectangular, intricately designed bodies and round heads — both memorialize prominent members of the society who died and embody their spirits.”
repatriation
FBI: FBI Art Crime Team Announces the Repatriation of Over 450 Cultural and Historical Artifacts to the Republic of Haiti
FBI: FBI Art Crime Team Announces the Repatriation of Over 450 Cultural and Historical Artifacts to the Republic of Haiti. “The 479 Haitian artifacts were discovered in 2014, when the FBI Art Crime Team seized more than 7,000 items from the private collection of an amateur archeologist, Donald Miller, who had likely acquired the items in contravention of state and federal law and international treaties. This was the largest single recovery of culture property in FBI history.”
Smithsonian Magazine: Website Provides Blueprint for Repatriating Aboriginal Remains
Smithsonian Magazine: Website Provides Blueprint for Repatriating Aboriginal Remains. “While efforts to bring Aboriginal remains home have increased in recent years, as the numbers show, there remains much work to be done when it comes to repatriation and community healing. A new website funded by the Australian Research Council and project partner organizations aims to support those intertwined efforts. Called Return, Reconcile, Renew (RRR), it illuminates the historic and ongoing implications of stealing ancestral remains from Aboriginal communities, provides a virtual space for support and healing, and also offers a roadmap to help Aboriginal communities successfully secure the return of stolen ancestral remains.”
This is Africa: Kenya is creating a database of plundered cultural artefacts and their current locations
This is Africa: Kenya is creating a database of plundered cultural artefacts and their current locations. “While other African countries have been petitioning for decades and are actively moving towards the repatriation of cultural artefacts that were plundered during the colonial era, Kenya has only recently launched an investigation into which objects were removed from the East African nation, where in the West they are housed and who holds the agency to demand their repatriation.”
‘They’re not property’: the people who want their ancestors back from British museums (The Guardian)
The Guardian: ‘They’re not property’: the people who want their ancestors back from British museums. “On 20 March this year, more than 150 years after they were cut from the corpse of the Ethiopian emperor Tewodros II by a British soldier, two locks of hair were returned by the National Army Museum in London after a request from Addis Ababa. A few days later, Norway’s King Harald V and Queen Sonja signed an agreement to repatriate thousands of artefacts, including a number of skulls, to the Rapa Nui people of Easter Island. And in April, German institutions will conduct their largest ever transfer of remains to Australia, involving 53 items from five sites in Munich, Stuttgart and Berlin. This follows a ‘joint declaration on the handling of colonial collections’ by ministers from all 16 German states, which argued that human material ‘does not belong’ behind glass.”
