‘An emotional thing’: Indigenous artifacts are coming home
Ryan Heavy Hand had been helping First Nations bring home ceremonial objects from museums for years, but this call from an institution in Oregon was a first.
“The museum had a beaver bundle,” said Heavy Hand, referring to one of the Blackfoot people’s most sacred and ceremonially important objects.
Many institutions were reluctant for such items to leave their collections, but not this one.
“(This museum) actually phoned the tribe and said, ‘Can somebody come and pick this up? Our staff are hearing animals sounds in the storage, where the bundle was kept.
“’They’d just like you to come and take it and bring it back home.’”
First Nations have been repatriating items for decades now. Masks, rattles, bundles, medicine pipes, bentwood boxes and headdresses in the hundreds have left urban museum cases and collection storehouses for the lands where they were made.
And, when they arrive, they no longer sit behind glass. Many have resumed their place at the heart of Indigenous cultural life. They have become spiritual and artistic inspirations to the descendants of those who made them.
“It definitely gave life to a lot of people,” said Jerry Potts Jr., a Piikani elder from southern Alberta, who was involved in many repatriations of Blackfoot ceremonial items. “There’s universities and collections all over that have given stuff back to the communities that’s back in full use right now.”
The movement home began in the 1970s, driven by the desire of young Indigenous people to revive their ceremonies and traditions before the elders who knew them died. Many of those ceremonies had oneof-a-kind objects at their heart and many, if not most, were in museums, universities and private collections. Getting them back was hard work. In 1994, Heavy Hand sat down with a fat directory of museums worldwide and sent out 4,000 form letters asking them if they had any Blackfoot material. Almost 200 museums wrote back saying they did.
“There were many, many thousands of items,” he said. “All of the major museums in Canada have really big Blackfoot collections.”
On the West Coast, Andy Wilson, cofounder of the Skidegate and Haida repatriation committees, was getting summer students to look through museum catalogues and write letters.
“They had to be proactive about it,” he said. “Now, museums are starting to contact First Nations.”
The objects started coming home. And, as soon as they did, the ceremonies and societies that depended on them resumed.
For Wilson, repatriation involved artifacts and human remains. The Haida had almost lost the art of making bentwood boxes, used, among other things, for burials.
The return of the bentwood boxes also led people to recover the songs and language appropriate to their use.
“It’s an emotional thing,” Wilson said. “All this stuff was beaten out of them (and) when they’re doing it, they realize how much they’ve lost, so there’s quite a bit of grief in there.”