German museum returns looted art to indigenous Alaskans
He led a delegation to Berlin in 2015 and has been working since then with the museum and the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which oversees Berlin’s museums, to establish their provenance and organize restitution.
Other items collected by Jacobsen were determined to have been fairly obtained through purchase or trade.
Elsewhere, Denmark has already returned human remains that were taken from the Chugach area. Johnson said much work remains researching the provenance of other artifacts scattered in museums around the U.S. and the world, including Britain, Russia and Finland.
“Sometimes museums feel that this is the end, that it’s a sad day, but this is really a new beginning,” he said. “The more you work together, the more you understand and enjoy the significance of these artifacts.”
Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation President Hermann Parzinger carefully handed one of the masks to Johnson at a ceremony Wednesday, saying he hoped they could work together on future historical and cultural projects.
Work is underway on an exhibition on Jacobsen, who brought thousands of items to Germany from settlements on the northwest coast of Canada and Alaska. It will offer what Parzinger said will be a “critical examination of the history of the collection from today’s perspective.”
The self-proclaimed captain’s accounts are more adventure than anthropological, Parzinger said.
“Johan Adrian Jacobsen was no academic, he was a sailor,” he said.
Ideally the artifacts returned Wednesday would go back into the caves from which they were taken, Johnson said, but since that’s impossible to do without risking their destruction, the hope is that they will be put on public display in a regional museum.