Repatriation and Restitution
NAGPRA, the Benin bronzes, the Potlatch masks at the Vatican: the return of sacred objects is the point where art history becomes a present-tense obligation.
Tagged: Contested Repatriated NAGPRA Repatriation
Repatriation is the return of sacred objects and ancestral remains to the communities they were taken from, and it has moved in a generation from a radical demand to a governed process. In the United States, NAGPRA (1990) requires federal agencies and funded museums to inventory Native American human remains and cultural items and to return them on a tribe's claim. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand run equivalent processes. European museums have begun returning the Benin bronzes to Nigeria, looted in 1897 and dispersed as the century's most famous trophy collection.
The Potlatch masks held by the Vatican's Anima Mundi museum concentrate every element of the question: objects surrendered under Canada's potlatch ban, when the ceremony itself was criminalized; carried to Rome as mission trophies; displayed for a century as ethnology; and now asked for by the descendant communities for whom they are not specimens but relatives and rights. Pope Francis called their return a gesture the church should make. The process continues.
This site's rules in such cases are the ones James set for the whole section: provenance is never fabricated, contested holding is stated as contested, community authority over display is respected, and an entry whose object is under claim carries that claim on its face. The Potlatch entry in this section runs in the redacted state: the record exists, the case is stated, and no image is shown.
References
Related Across the Site
- Potlatch Masks — Image Withheld Art Entry — Masks danced at the potlatch open and transform as the ancestor arrives. This page shows no image: the masks are community-governed regalia, and their photographs are published here only with the owning community's consent, which has not been sought for specific pieces.
- Indigenous and Traditional Art Tradition — Sacred objects under community protocol: sacred and secret are distinguished, and repatriation is a live question.