Sacred Relics Returning To Indigenous Group
Nearly 20 years ago, Andrea Carmen, a member of the Yaqui Nation, an Indigenous group in Mexico and the United States, was at an event commemorating International Day of Indigenous Peoples at a Stockholm museum. She was invited to view the museum’s collection of items from the Americas.
What she spotted startled her: a Maaso Kova, a ceremonial deer’s head sacred to the Yaqui Nation. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” Ms. Carmen said of her discovery at the Museum of Ethnography. It was, she added, “like seeing a child in a cage.”
For the Yaqui Nation, the Maaso Kova is a sacred item used in dances to connect the physical and spiritual worlds.
After Ms. Carmen returned to Arizona, she asked a Yaqui tribal chief to petition the museum to return the Yaqui items. It took the museum 11 years to issue a response and eight more for them to be returned.
This month, officials from the museum, the Swedish and Mexican governments and the United Nations met in Sweden to authorize the transfer of the deer head and 23 other items back to the Yaqui Nation. The artifacts have been shipped to Mexico City for the transfer.
“We’re so happy to be receiving our Maaso Kova, which to us is a living being that was locked up for a long time,” said Juan Gregorio Jaime León, a Yaqui member in Mexico. (Photographing the deer’s head is considered inappropriate by the Yaqui Nation.)
The return of the Maaso Kova is the first successful repatriation of artifacts to an Indigenous group overseen by the United Nations under its Declaration of Indigenous Rights, said Kristen Carpenter, a former U.N. official. The Yaqui probably would not have been able to reclaim their artifacts without U.N. pressure, said Ms. Carmen.
As conversations about racism and colonialism have increased across the world, discussions about the repatriation of cultural items that were stolen, taken under duress or removed without the consent of their owners have intensified.
A major challenge in repatriation is the question of provenance — how a museum came to possess an artifact. But the U.N. declaration of rights, ratified in 2007, allowed the Yaqui to defend their claim, however the objects were obtained.
Ms. Carmen hopes the process to reclaim the Yaqui items can be applied to other Indigenous repatriation efforts.
“We’re calling for a new relationship,” she said, “by which we can set the injustices and harms of the past behind us and heal the wounds.”