In the News
This is a sampling of news articles related to repatriation that have been published in the last 2.5 years.
"Mohegan Tribe saw repatriation from Dartmouth College. Why are the Occom papers important?," Norwich Bulletin, 4/2022
"Smithsonian to give back its collection of Benin bronzes," Washington Post, 3/2022
"Germany, Austria Repatriate Dozens of Human Skulls to Hawaii," Smithsonian Magazine, 2/2022
"Mexican activists hack Viennese museum’s audioguide in protest over its ownership of the Montezuma headdress," The Art Newspaper, 2/2022
"Why the Smithsonian is changing its approach to collecting, starting with the removal of looted Benin treasures," Washington Post, 1/2022
"Thailand's art repatriation and the power of netizens," Asia Media Centre, 12/2021
"Looted 16th-century Manuscripts Are Returned to Mexico’s National Archive," Hyperallergic, 10/2021
"‘Unprecedented’ restitution: US returns antiquities to Iraq." Al-Jazeera, 7/2021
"Austrian Museum Won't Loan Famed Headdress to Mexico," ARTnews, 8/2021
"The Colonized World Wants Its Artifacts Back," Vice, 12/2020
New Digital Project Details 150 Belgian Libraries Looted by the Nazis, Smithsonian Magazine, 12/2020
"A new approach to repatriation: The two museums that are nurturing relationships with communities of origin," Museums Journal, 11/2020
"Australian Government Pledges Millions Towards Repatriation of Indigenous Artifacts," ARTnews, 11/2020
"Return of Mohegan Elder's Diaries to Help Revitalize Language," Cornell Chronicle, 11/2020
"The Hunt for Nazi Loot Still Sitting on Shelves," New York Times, 1/2019
"The Passamaquoddy Reclaim Their Culture Through Digital Repatriation," New Yorker, 1/2019
If you are unfamiliar with the issues related to repatriation, this video serves as an introduction to the debate about the ethics of museum collections.
Are museum collections ethical? How did these institutions end up with their vast array of artifacts and remains from every corner of the globe? . . . Danielle [Bainbridge] examines this complicated debate [in this episode of PBS' Origin of Everything] and looks closely at the cases of Saartjie Baartman and Chang and Eng Bunker. What do you think? Should objects be repatriated, left on display, or something in between?"
Select Works by Speakers
The Archive Thief by ISBN: 9780199380954In the aftermath of the Holocaust, the Jewish historian Zosa Szajkowski stole tens of thousands of archival documents related to French Jewish history from public archives and collections in France and moved them, illicitly, to New York. Why did this respectable historian become a thief? And why did librarians in the United States and Israel accept these materials from him, turning a blind eye to the signs of ownership they bore? With her award-winning book, The Archive Thief, Lisa Moses Leff reconstructs Szajkowski's gripping story in all its ambiguity. . . . Leff takes us into the backstage of the archives, revealing the powerful ideological, economic, and psychological forces that made Holocaust-era Jewish scholars care more deeply than ever before about preserving the remnants of their past. As Leff shows, it is only when we understand the issues at the heart of his story, in all their ambiguity and complexity, that we can begin to address the larger questions of the rightful ownership of Jewish archives, as well as other contested archives, that are still at issue today.
The Contested Crown by ISBN: 9780226802060In Contested Crown, Khadija von Zinnennburg Carroll meditates on the case of a spectacular feather headdress believed to have belonged to Montezuma, the last emperor of the Aztecs. This crown has long been the center of political and cultural power struggles, and it is one of the most contested museum claims between Europe and the Americas. Taken to Europe during the conquest of Mexico, it was placed at Ambras Castle, the Habsburg residence of the author's ancestors, and is now in Vienna's Welt Museum. Mexico has long requested to have it back, but Welt Museum uses science to insist it is too fragile to travel. Both the biography of a cultural object and a history of collecting and colonizing, this book offers an artist's perspective on the creative potentials of repatriation. Carroll compares Holocaust and colonial ethical claims, and she considers relationships between indigenous people, international law and the museums that amass global treasures, the significance of copies, and how conservation science shapes collections. Illustrated with diagrams and rare archival material, this book brings together global history, European history, and material culture around this fascinating object and the debates about repatriation.
"Hope Is on the Next Page": 100 Years of the Library of the Jewish Museum in Prague by ISBN: 9788086889542Catalogue for the exhibition of the same name at the Robert Guttmann Gallery – the first detailed look at the history of the Library of the Jewish Museum in Prague, which is now a fully functional and modern institution with a comprehensive collection of Judaica and Hebraica from Bohemia and Moravia. This publication deals with the founding and development of the museum’s book collection, the wartime Central Jewish Museum and the library’s activities after the war, during the existence of the State Jewish Museum and through to the present. In addition, it features the pre-war Library of the Prague Jewish Religious Community and the fate of the Central Library in Terezín.
How to Accept German Reparations by ISBN: 9780812246063In a landmark process that transformed global reparations after the Holocaust, Germany created the largest sustained redress program in history, amounting to more than $60 billion. When human rights violations are presented primarily in material terms, acknowledging an indemnity claim becomes one way for a victim to be recognized. At the same time, indemnifications provoke a number of difficult questions about how suffering and loss can be measured: How much is an individual life worth? How much or what kind of violence merits compensation? What is "financial pain," and what does it mean to monetize "concentration camp survivor syndrome"? Susan Slyomovics explores this and other compensation programs, both those past and those that might exist in the future, through the lens of anthropological and human rights discourse. How to account for variation in German reparations and French restitution directed solely at Algerian Jewry for Vichy-era losses? Do crimes of colonialism merit reparations? How might reparations models apply to the modern-day conflict in Israel and Palestine? . . . Slyomovics maintains that we can use the legacies of German reparations to reconsider approaches to reparations in the future, and the result is an investigation of practical implications, complicated by the difficult legal, ethnographic, and personal questions that reparations inevitably prompt.
Indigenous Notions of Ownership and Libraries, Archives and Museums by ISBN: 9783110362992Tangible and intangible forms of indigenous knowledges and cultural expressions are often found in libraries, archives or museums. Often the "legal" copyright is not held by the indigenous people's group from which the knowledge or cultural expression originates. Indigenous peoples regard unauthorized use of their cultural expressions as theft and believe that the true expression of that knowledge can only be sustained, transformed, and remain dynamic in its proper cultural context. Readers will begin to understand how to respect and preserve these ways of knowing while appreciating the cultural memory institutions' attempts to transfer the knowledges to the next generation.
Returning Southeast Asia's Past by ISBN: 9789813251243For the past century and a half, extensive looting and illicit trafficking of Southeast Asia's cultural heritage have scattered art objects from the region to museums and private collections around the world. Today, however, power relations are shifting, a new awareness is growing, and new questions are emerging about the representation and ownership of Southeast Asian cultural material located in the West. This book offers a timely consideration of object restitution and related issues across Southeast Asia, bringing together a range of viewpoints, including those of museum professionals and scholars in Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia, as well as Europe, North America, and Australia. The contributors address legal, cultural, political and diplomatic issues involved in the restitution process, and they also look at the ways object restitution is integral to evolving narratives of national identity. Ultimately, the book's editors conclude, restitution processes can transform narratives of loss into opportunities for gain, building knowledge and reconstructing relationships across national borders.
The Whole Picture: The Colonial Story of the Art in Our Museums & Why We Need to Talk About It by ISBN: 9781788401555If you think art history has to be pale, male and stale - think again. Should museums be made to give back their marbles? Is it even possible to 'decolonise' our galleries? Must Rhodes fall? From the stolen Wakandan art in Black Panther, to Emmanuel Macron's recent commitment to art restitution, and Beyoncé and Jay Z's provocative music video filmed in the Louvre, the question of decolonising our relationship with the art around us is quickly gaining traction. People are waking up to the seedy history of the world's art collections, and are starting to ask difficult questions about what the future of museums should look like. In The Whole Picture, art historian and Uncomfortable Art Tour guide Alice Procter provides a manual for deconstructing everything you thought you knew about art, and fills in the blanks with the stories that have been left out of the art history canon for centuries. . . . Through these stories, Alice brings out the underlying colonial narrative lurking beneath the art industry today, and suggests different ways of seeing and thinking about art in the modern world. The Whole Picture is a much-needed provocation to look more critically at the accepted narratives about art, and rethink and disrupt the way we interact with the museums and galleries that display it.
Amineddoleh, Leila. “Museums Have a Responsibility to Protect Cultural Heritage.” Aedon (Bologna) 2 (aprile-luglio 2013) (2013): 31–41. Web.
Amineddoleh, Leila A. “The Legal Tools Used before and During Conflict to Avoid Destruction of Cultural Heritage.” Future anterior 14.1 (2017): 37–48. Web.
Amineddoleh, Leila A. “Cultural Heritage Vandalism and Looting: The Role of Terrorist Organizations, Public Institutions and Private Collectors.” Santander Art and Culture Law Review 1.2 (2015): 27–62. Print.
Bušek, M.: ‘Identifying Owners of Books Held by the Jewish Museum in Prague’ in Vitalizing Memory: International Perspectives on Provenance Research. Washington 2005
Bušek, M.: "Whose are they and where did they come from?" Methods of identifying the original owners of books held by the Jewish Museum in Prague in Terezín Declaration – Ten Years Later. 7th international conference: the documentation, identification, and restitution of the cultural assets of WWII victims: proceedings of an international academic conference held in Prague on 18–19 June 2019. Prague 2019
Ezeluomba (2019) The Development of the Exhibition of African Art in American Art Museums: Strategy for Engaging
Recent Repatriation Debate about the Cultural Property of Africa. In Museum Innovation: Building More Equitable, Relevant and Impactful Museums. Eds. Robert R. Janes and Haitham Eid. Rutledge. Forthcoming.
Ndubuisi, E. (2017) The Legitimacy of Kingship: Benin Art and Political Intrigues from the 18th Century. Manwa Katha Journal of Adivasi and Folklore Studies. Vol 4. 1. Pp. 4-17
Teeter, Wendy Giddens, Desiree Martinez, and Dorothy Lippert. “Creating a New Future: Redeveloping the Tribal-Museum Relationship in the Time of NAGPRA.” International journal of cultural property 28.2 (2021): 201–209. Web.
Underhill, Karen J. “Protocols for Native American Archival Materials.” RBM : a journal of rare books, manuscripts, and cultural heritage 7.2 (2006): 134–145. Web.
Dr. Lisa Moses Leff, Director of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Professor of History at American University, examines the organized Jewish efforts to seek restitution for the art, books, religious objects, and other cultural treasures that had been looted by the Nazis during the Holocaust..
In this extract from the 'Empire State of Mind’ episode of Renegade Inc, Alice Proctor discusses her Uncomfortable Art Tours.
Carrying Our Ancestors Home's team asked tribal experts in cultural heritage and repatriation what they think other tribal members should understand about repatriation, and how any tribal member can get involved in protecting cultural sites and ancestors. www.coah-repat.com
In 2004, Cornell acquired the diaries of Fidelia Flying Bird Fielding, the last fluent speaker of the Mohegan-Pequot language. The diaries were purchased as part of the Huntington Free Library's Native American Collection. [In November 2020] Cornell returned her papers to her descendants.
The importance of provenance research in the resolution of art disputes cannot be overstated. Provenance discoveries may provide the basis for an ownership and restitution claim, and provenance information can offer evidence to validate the authenticity or attribution of a work of art. Moreover, these reports are vital in appraising the monetary value of art objects, a central concern in many legal disputes. Learn more about how provenance research impacts art law. The event was recorded at The Frick Collection, February 18, 2020
Damien Webb, Manager of Indigenous Engagement at the State Library of NSW, talks about Indigenous cultural and intellectual property (ICIP) from a libraries perspective, and how ICIP applies to library collection items. Learn more about the ATSILIRN Protocols and how they can be applied when working with Indigenous collections:
Te Moana is an experimental documentary film made in a collaboration between Rangiwaho Marae and Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll about the 'Cooks New Clothes' research project. Learn more: https://bit.ly/3M6LDFo.
Carrying Our Ancestors Home, a project founded by UCLA’s American Indian Studies Center and the Fowler Museum under the directorship of Dr. Mishuana Goeman and Dr. Wendy Teeter, seeks to illuminate previously unengaged practices and infrastructure behind the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and how Native people regard various aspects of the law, and the work they do to enact and enforce it. To achieve this goal, they have collaborated with native cultural practitioners, tribal members, professionals, and academics in the Southern California area to create a digital educational resource webpage about the repatriation of ancestral remains and cultural items.
Established in 1906, the Jewish Museum in Prague is a museum documenting Jewish heritage in the Czech Republic. Its collection of Judaica is one of the largest in the world, and includes about 40,000 objects, 130,000 books, and an expansive archive of histories from the Czech Jewish community.
Object Repatriation and Knowledge Co-production for Indonesia's Cultural Artefacts
Written by Panggah Ardiyansyah, this blog post explores the benefits and limitations of knowledge production resulting from the repatriation of objects to Indonesia, drawing from case studies such as the defunct Museum Nusantara in Delft to the National Museum of Indonesia in Jakarta and the British Library's digitization of Yogyakarta manuscripts. Ardivansyah aims "to show that the repatriation process can be used as an opportunity to decentre the construction of knowledge inspired by or even embodied by the returned objects themselves," while underscoring the importance of physically transferring objects to and preserving ownership by Indonesian communities.
Protocols for Native American Archives
The Protocols for Native American Archives were created in April 2006 by a group of nineteen Native American and non-Native American archivists, librarians, museum curators, historians, and anthropologists gathered at Northern Arizona University Cline Library in Flagstaff, Arizona. The participants included representatives from fifteen Native American, First Nation, and Aboriginal communities. This website contains the best professional practices for culturally responsive care and use of American Indian archival material held by non-tribal libraries and archives as well as Native American communities.
Indigenous Engagement Branch at the State Library of NSW
The Indigenous Engagement Branch at the State Library of New South Wales works with Indigenous communities across NSW concerning the preservation and management of Indigenous documentary heritage resources, and collaborates proactively with Indigenous people and communities regarding access to the collection. The site also contains protocols and statements of best practice to provide guidance for the Library’s work in this priority area.
Culturally Safe Libraries: Working with Indigenous Collections
The National and State Libraries Australasia (NSLA) established the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Culturally Safe Libraries Program in 2018 to ensure that their libraries are culturally safe spaces in which staff working with Indigenous collections are well informed about content and access protocols, and about the history and cultural heritage of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples those collections relate to. NSLA libraries are committed to providing cultural competency and role specific training for all staff, which is based on protocols developed by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Library and Information Resource Network – known as the ATISILIRN Protocols.
Restitution and Institutional Change
The Restitution and Institutional Change project, led by Professor Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, seeks to analyze how British national museums have obtained, curated, and displayed non-Western objects and intellectual property, with a focus on their repatriation. The project also aims to expose "the systemic racism and intolerance of British national museums and developed strategies for exhibiting Empire, including scientific facts and their materialisation in art, the difference between Institutional critique and infrastructural activism, transparency, movement, performance and experimentation, and the mobilisation of shame and embarrassment about Empire."
Related Books
Additional Resources
The Central Registry of Information on Looted Cultural Property (1933-1945) is a "repository of information on Nazi looting and contemporary efforts to research and resolve all outstanding issues. It is a charitable body operating under the auspices of the European Association for Jewish Studies, the leading umbrella organisation for academic Jewish studies in Europe." This website was created in partnership with the Commission for Looted Art in Europe, which is a "non-profit, expert, representative body in Europe that negotiates policies and procedures, assists families to identify and recover looted cultural property, and provides guidance and information to individuals, institutions and governments worldwide."
Looted Cultural Assets was founded in 2016 and consists of a network of libraries in Germany whose goal is to investigate expropriations during the Nazi era as well as commemorate and reconcile with victims of the Nazi regime. It includes a focus on provenance research, in which libraries cooperate to find, investigate, and return books seized books to their rightful owners and heirs, both individuals and organizations, with an emphasis on books belonging to Jews.
Oxford's Procedures for claims for the Return of Cultural Objects
Oxford's Procedures for dealing with claims for the Return of Cultural Objects from the Oxford University Museums were drafted in partnership with the following museums: GLAM Collections Group, GLAM Board, University Legal Services and Farrer’s & Co. The document covers the collections stewarded by these four University museums and the Bodleian Libraries where legal title is vested in the University of Oxford.
Collections Trust Restitution and Repatriation
Collections Trust Restitution and Repatriation is a collection of resources shared by different heritage organizations, including detailed procedures regarding repatriation, deaccessioning, claims for the return of cultural objects, researching the validity of a claim, recording a claim, processing a claim, and a code of ethics for the development of museum collections.
Barker, Alex W. “Museums and Restitution: New Practices, New Approaches (Tythacott and Arvanitis, Eds.).” Museum anthropology review 9.1-2 (2015): 117–121. Web.
Fiskesjö, Magnus. “Global Repatriation and ‘Universal’ Museums.” Anthropology news 51.3 (2010): 10–12. Web.
Lambert-Pennington, Katherine. “What Remains? Reconciling Repatriation, Aboriginal Culture, Representation and the Past.” Oceania 77.3 (2007): 313–336. Web.
Nilsson Stutz. “Claims to the Past. A Critical View of the Arguments Driving Repatriation of Cultural Heritage and Their Role in Contemporary Identity Politics.” Journal of intervention and statebuilding 7.2 (2013): 1–26. Web.
Roehrenbeck, Carol A. “Repatriation of Cultural Property : Who Owns the Past? An Introduction to Approaches and to Selected Statutory Instruments.” International journal of legal information 38.2 (2010): 185–200. Web.
Thebele, Winani. “The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution, by Dan Hicks: London: Pluto Press, 2020. 368 Pp.; 20 B/w Ills. $27.” The Art bulletin (New York, N.Y.) 104.1 (2022): 185–188. Web.
Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1.1 (2012): 1-40. Web.
Wood, Paul. “Display, Restitution and World Art History: The Case of the ‘Benin Bronzes.’” Visual culture in Britain 13.1 (2012): 115–137. Web.
Yu, Peter K. “Traditional Knowledge, Intellectual Property, and Indigenous Culture: An Introduction.” New Europe law review 11.2 (2003): 239-245. Print.
Anders Rydell discussed his book, the story of the systematic pillaging of Europe's libraries by Nazis during World War II, and the small team of heroic librarians now working to return the stolen books to their rightful owners. Through extensive new research, Rydell reveals the untold story of how the Nazis began to compile libraries of their own that were used to wage an intellectual war on their enemies. In this secret war, the libraries of Jews, communists, liberal politicians, LGBT activists, Catholics, Freemasons and other opposition groups were appropriated for Nazi research and used as an intellectual weapon against their owners.
To Nigerians, the Benin Bronzes are more than just sublime sculptures and carvings, they are spiritual diaries that tell the story of an ancient kingdom. Looted by the British, the Bronzes have become highly-charged symbols in the debate around the legacy of colonial violence. Hundreds are still held by the British Museum. Nigeria says it's been asking for them back for decades.
The Crown of Emperor Moctezuma, assassinated by Hernán Cortés, was stolen 500 years ago during the colonization invasion and today is exhibited in the Vienna Ethnographic Museum "Welt." For the Austrians, it is an exotic object, but for the Mexicans and the descendants of the Aztecs, it means much more. It is a spiritual symbol that must return home.