Bone fragment illustrates museum cooperation
A bone fragment unearthed last week in the Kelowna Museums collection may be the ancient remains of an Indigenous person.
If analysis proves that to be the case, the museum will offer the fragment to an Indigenous community, museum director Linda Digby says.
“We’re here to do the right thing,” Digby said in an interview.
The item was found by an Indigenous researcher with an interest in archaeology who regularly reviews the museum’s collection, Digby said. Other Indigenous people do similar work.
“We regularly have Indigenous people come and look through our collections. The door is always open to them,” Digby said, adding the museum believes it has a good relationship with Indigenous communities.
On Tuesday, International Museums Day, the B.C. Museums Association called upon all publicly funded institutions to repatriate any Indigenous ancestral human remains and burial items they might have in their collections.
“True, meaningful and lasting reconciliation must include the return of our ancestors back to the nations where they were taken from. We must work together to realize this, and in doing so free our children and their children from the sacred obligation we have for finding our ancestors and bringing them home,” Dan Smith, a former chairman of the BCMA Indigenous Advisory Committee and a member of the Wei Wai Kum First Nation in Campbell River, said in a release.
Decades ago, the Kelowna Museum sometimes had human remains in its collection, Digby said. The remains may have been unearthed as a result of construction projects or brought to the museum by police after their discovery in a remote area by a member of the public.
“A safe place was needed for the remains,” Digby said. “The museum held them in our collection with great care and respect.”
For many years, Digby said, Kelowna Museum has had a good working relationship with the Sncewips Heritage Museum, operated by the Westbank First Nation. Many items in the Kelowna Museum’s collection have been transferred to the Sncewips museum, she said.
The WFN’s museum opened in new premises early last year at the Okanagan Lake Shopping Centre at the corner of Highway 97 and Westside Road, but is temporarily closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Until the discovery of the bone fragment last week, museum officials did not believe they had any human remains left in the collection. And the museum does not have any funerary objects, items that might have been associated with the burial of ancient Indigenous people, Digby said.