Repatriation
I quickly blogged the other day about an article in the Australian suggesting that the repatriation of human remains is becoming more accepted by museums. Michael Brown rightly notes on his site that:
I would amend this to say that retention of the remains of indigenous peoples is the focal point of the repatriation movement. Thousands of skeletons of Europeans, dating to the middle ages and earlier, remain in museum collections, mostly without controversy, although a few pagan groups have begun to demand repatriation and pagan reburial of the remains of pre-Christian communities.
Brown is correct. I was a bit sloppy in my post–the focus of the Australian article was indeed on Indigenous remains. The article argues that there has been a trend towards museums favoring the “ethical” over the “scientific” justification for repatriating and reburial of human remains. Certainly this is binary leaves out the possibility of an ethical science around human remains and it also eclipses the political reasons why Indigenous remains are the focus of repatriation efforts and not, as Brown points out, European remains. It’s not just the colonial history of how Indigenous remains got into museums that is the focus of the debates (although of course this is significant) it is also the on-going marginalization, displacement, and oppression of Indigenous peoples (globally) that has made repatriation (not just of human remains) a central political tool to highlight a host of issues central to Indigenous peoples lives today. Repatriation is one key issue and focus among core arguments concerning sovereignty, land rights, and economic marginalization that pivot around on-going injustices especially in settler nations where museums were the benchmarks of establishing national identities and continue to be icons of national contemporary imaginings.
About The Author
Kim Christen
I am an Assistant Professor at Washington State University. I use this blog to keep myself writing. I blog about Australian Aboriginal politics, Indigenous issues, Indigenous new media, cultural politics, and other issues that come up. I made the icon above at Portrait Icon Maker
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Author his web sitehttp://www.kimberlychristen.com
Hi Kimberly,
Jason Jackson referred me to your site. I found this post an interesting one in a number of ways. Perhaps one factor why indigenous remains are treated differently is that that, speaking generally, we see uniformity across temporal boundaries with “primitive” people (even if we would never use the term) and also treat them as internally undifferentiated groups: Thus a claim made to a skeleton from 1000 years ago made by an indigenous group is seen as relatively non-controversial because the group’s claim has primacy over the desires of particular individuals (we never hear about those who don’t care or who don’t want the returns) within that group and because we see them as somehow the same across that time span.
I have to admit that your post brought this up because of the, to me at least, absurdity of some group of neo-Pagans trying to claim authority over pre-Christian remains. Absurd because I (rightly, I believe) see around two millennia of discontinuity and no basis for such claim.
Yet if it were a group of, say, Incas trying to claim authority over skeletons of similar antiquity, it wouldn’t seem so absurd.
What does this say about scholarly attitudes towards indigenous peoples? Despite our claims of respect and to have corrected the mistakes of the past, have we actually bootlegged in ideas about “primitives” and other categories we claim to have rejected? Is “indigenous” just a renaming of the same concept at some level, a sort of New Speak way of keeping the same category (minus the disdain, perhaps)?
Mind, I’m not claiming that NAGPRA is bad or that the idea of allowing people to have control over remains that they see as belonging to them in some capacity is wrong. Nor am I suggesting that your comments about the uses to which indigenous groups use repatriation are wrong: I think they are spot on.
I’m really, instead, taking this orthogonal to your posting to look at other issues. Brown’s comment raises a lot of issues for me about these categories. I think the notion of indigeneity is an interesting one because it isn’t in any way what one might call a natural category, yet it has taken on many of the trappings of such a category, to the point where, significantly I think, you and other talking about “Indigenous peoples” vs. “indigenous peoples”. There are a lot of cases of people in this category using it to subvert dominant power structures (the case I am most familiar with is that of the Ainu in Japan, some of whom (activists) assert that they are part of a global indigenous ethnos as a way to challenge and reform racial and political concepts within Japan).
Interesting issues. Thanks for the post