Encounters with Repatriation
By: Aubrey Jones
The term repatriation is defined by Merriam-Webster as “the act or process of restoring or returning someone or something to the country of origin, allegiance, or citizenship”. Though I had heard of repatriation, I had not had my own experience with it until this fall semester. Within a week, not only did I read about this process in Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America’s Culture by Chip Colwell, but I also had two experiences with it.
My first experience with repatriation occurred about two weeks before I read Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits. My father called to tell me a story about a strange phone call that he had received. A lady had called him and told him this story about how she had bought a box of letters at an estate sale thinking it was a box of stamps. She explained how when she realized they were letters, she started searching for some of the names mentioned and that is how she found my dad. The box of letters this woman bought were letters between my grandmother and great-grandmother on my father’s side. They date back to the 1980s when my dad and his family were living in Germany. Neither my dad nor uncle knew this box existed or how they ended up at an estate sale. We are extremely blessed that this lady tried so hard to make sure the letters found their way home, rather than keeping them or tossing them out. These letters hold sentimental value to our family, and I just cannot imagine having to fight for something that has sentimental and spiritual value. This thought is where Colwell’s book and my second experience with repatriation connect.
Colwell’s book, as the title makes clear, is about the fight for Native Americans to reclaim their cultural artifacts. Much of their fight is against museums that have skeletal remains and other important cultural artifacts; burial artifacts, spiritual artifacts, etc. Many of these artifacts were obtained through improper archaeological digs and other ways, which has rightfully upset Native tribes. Their fight is to take back the artifacts and remains that rightfully belong to them so that they may properly lay them to rest, dispose of, etc. Over the last several years many museums have worked to repatriate these remains and artifacts to the correct tribes. This leads to my second experience with repatriation.
The East Tennessee History Center–where I intern in collections–is currently removing Native American artifacts that are on loan because they are being repatriated. From a collections standpoint, we had to carefully remove the artifacts from their cases and correctly match up the artifacts with their donors so that we could return them. As far as I know, the few artifacts that we were pulling did not have any great spiritual significance, so we did not have specific guidelines to adhere to apart from typical collections. There was one artifact though–a pipe–that the tribe requested only a male handle. I was not given specifics as to why, just that a woman handling the pipe was of great significance, so they asked for a male to handle it instead. The whole experience was fascinating to me, and I hope that I continue to have experiences with returning such valued artifacts to others as I have had done for me.
