Post #52869 by emspace on Fri, Sep 26, 2003 7:31 PM

Where I come from and where I currently live (Alberta and British Columbia) these issues have been around for a long time and are never going to go away. There was even one famous incident where a medicine chief walked into a museum (one I've been to many times) having made an appointment to view a medicine bundle of his people, smiled nicely at the curator attending him, and walked out with it. It has never been seen since by ethnographers of any sort. I think it's rightfully a major issue for aboriginal peoples everywhere. Reading some of the history of Franz Boas' expeditions in my area is enlightening.

To look at it another way, does the Dresden Museum, and the Leningrad Museum, etc. need to have Northwest Coast or Polynesian artefacts? Personally I don't think so, that's why we have books and CD-Roms and the Web etc. And let's not forget there are already native Hawai'ian ethnographers and curators with the training to deal with these artefacts in properly accepted Western fashion, should it be decided that's what must happen. Hey folks, native Hawai'ians are like the First Nations people in my country, an underemployed underclass of people who've pretty much been left out of the Big Plans that have been made for their native land.

So, having opened every can of worms I could think of, here's what one band in British Columbia did: they opened their own museum, on their own land, and petitioned the government to return the shitloads of their property that had been lifted from their villages (as recently as the 1920s, after the potlatch ceremony was outlawed). It is a gradual process, but it is happening.

It wil be interesting to see how the Hawai'ians and the Museum resolve this. It could be a landmark opportunity for everyone; the idea of making exact copies is also an excellent one Herr Professor Doktor Freelance...

aloha,
em.