A Canadian birchbark canoe dating to the eighteenth century, that was unexpectedly discovered in Cornwall will be returned to Canada. It is thought to be the oldest surviving example of its type. Unusually, the documentation from its acquisition is surprisingly clear & detailed, giving more information about the provenance of it.

From:
Canada.com

Birchbark canoe from 18th century returning to Canada.
By Randy Boswell, Postmedia News December 27, 2010

It’s being described as the world’s oldest canoe, a one-of-a-kind relic from 18th-century Canada rediscovered in a storage shed in Britain and bound for repatriation to this country next year.

Earlier this month, the National Maritime Museum in Cornwall announced the “incredible find” at an estate in Penryn, England. Curators said the canoe – found in two pieces but remarkably well preserved given the passage of time – would be stabilized by conservators and exhibited in the U.K. before shipment overseas for permanent display at the Canadian Canoe Museum in Peterborough, Ont.
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In a very interesting followup to the amusing story of Lord Elgin’s rocks, on display in the Canadian Museum of Civilization, the current Lord Elgin has given an interview about why he made the decision to return the rocks, along with various other items to Canada.

Most telling is the quote near the end of the video:

It was a pity I felt, that people in Canada were not able to see them & touch them & so on & only hear about them.
There came a moment that there was a place that they could go to, where they would become, as they were in our house a part of our family, they were going to go back to be part of the family that was Canada.

Surely the same now applies to Greece since the building of the New Acropolis Museum in Athens?

As I’ve said before, one wonders whether the Elgin Marbles would already be back in Greece if the Seventh Earl of Elgin hadn’t been forced to sell them when faced with bankruptcy?

This story reads almost like a peculiar parody of the Parthenon Marbles… The Eighth Earl of Elgin (son of the Seventh Earl who removed the sculptures from the Parthenon) was at one time governor of Canada (when he wasn’t ransacking the Summer Palace in Beijing). During his time there, rocks got thrown at him during a riot, that he later brought back to his family home in Scotland as a souvenir of the experience. A few years ago, the Elgin family then decided to return Elgin’s rocks(as they became known), so that they could go on display in Canada as they were a part of Canada’s history.

One wonders, if Elgin had not faced financial insolvency & been forced to sell the Parthenon Sculptures, would his family have taken a more enlightened approach to the British Museum & returned the sculptures to Greece already?

From:
Edmonton Journal

History museum offers new narrative of Confederation
By Randy Boswell, Postmedia News October 28, 2010

Canada’s main history museum has unveiled a new exhibit casting the country’s Confederation story in a fresh light emphasizing the tensions that threatened to pull British North America apart in the years leading up to 1867’s unification project.

It’s a rewriting of the narrative of the country’s birth, says Canadian Museum of Civilization president Victor Rabinovitch, that doesn’t follow “the usual line about how peaceful everything was up here.”
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The Haida in Canada have secured the return of ancestral remains from the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, which will now be reburied. The handover of the human remains follows extensive negotiations that began in 1996.

From:
QCI Observer

Reburial scheduled for Thursday
August 4, 2010 12:24 PM

A Haida ancestor whose remains have been in England for more than 100 years is on his way home.

The remains were collected by Reverend Charles Harrison from the Masset area and have been held in the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University for many years. Rev. Harrison first came to the islands in 1882.
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Michaelle Jean, Canada’s Governor General plans to make a visit to the New Acropolis Museum during a trip to Athens.

From:
Athens News Agency

11/02/2009
Canada’s Gov. General in Olympia

The Governor General of Canada, Michaelle Jean, on Friday evening visited the “Art Matters” forum in Athens along with her Canadian filmmaker husband Jean-Daniel Lafond, with the focus on possible film co-productions between Greece and Canada as well as international film festivals.

Jean and her husband were welcomed to the forum — which was created by Lafond — by the president of the Greek Film Centre Giorgos Papalios.
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More coverage of the controversy surrounding the exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Royal Ontario Museum.

From:
Forward – The Jewish Daily

Furor Over Dead Sea Scrolls Exhibition
By Michael Kaminer
Published July 15, 2009, issue of July 24, 2009.

Toronto — Crowds at the Royal Ontario Museum’s heavily hyped Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition — Dead Sea Scrolls: Words That Changed the World, which runs until January 3, 2010 — have far exceeded the museum’s own expectations. In the show’s first nine days, more than 18,000 people flocked to the museum’s spectacular new Daniel Libeskind-designed Michael Lee-Chin Crystal pavilion — about 52% above the exhibitors’ own projections.

But hosannas for the showing, featuring four scroll fragments on loan from the Israel Antiquities Authority and displayed in public for the first time, have not been universal. Last April, the Palestinian Authority appealed to Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, to cancel the show, citing international conventions that make it illegal for a government agency to take archaeological artifacts from a territory that its country occupies.
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The Dead Sea Scrolls are on display in the Royal Ontario Museum – this is not without controversy though, as Palestinian Groups claim state that these artefacts come from the occupied territories.

In many ways, this is a case that could be solved easily – the issue is that the true reasons behind various aspects of the recent history of the scrolls are not ignored – but the museum is ignoring these problems for fear of upsetting other people (by stating the truth rater than ignoring it).

From:
Independent

Robert Fisk’s World: You won’t find any lessons in unity in the Dead Sea Scrolls
I looked at the texts in Toronto – a tale that was bound to pose a series of questions

Saturday, 11 July 2009

At last, I have seen the Dead Sea Scrolls. There they were, under their protective, cool-heated screens, the very words penned on to leather and papyrus 2,000 years ago, the world’s most significant record of the Old Testament.

I guess you’ve got to see it to believe it. I can’t read Hebrew – let alone ancient Hebrew (or Greek or Aramaic, the other languages of the scrolls) – but some of the letters are familiar to me from Arabic. The “seen” (s) of Arabic, and the “meem” (m) are almost the same as Hebrew and there they were, set down by some ancient who knew, as we do, only the past and nothing of the future. Most of the texts are in the Bible; several are not. “May God most high bless you, may he show you his face and may he open for you,” it is written on the parchments. “For he will honour the pious upon the throne of an eternal kingdom.”
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Legislative difficulties & high costs may mean that many sacred items that ought to be in the Blackfoot cultural centre have little chance of being returned.

From:
Calgary Herald

Displaced Blackfoot artefacts remain out of reach
Feb 08, 2009 Web embargo to 7 a.m. ET
By Jamie Komarnicki, Canwest News Service

CALGARY – More than 18 months after a sprawling Blackfoot cultural centre opened on the Siksika reserve, museum officials say scores of displaced artifacts potentially worth millions of dollars remain out of reach.

Faced with legislative hassles and jaw-dropping costs, curators of Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park fear that sacred items lost years ago to unscrupulous explorers and collectors may never return to their native land, said president Jack Royal.
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More coverage of Influence, Janet Munsil’s play who’s plot revolves around the Parthenon Marbles in the British Museum.

From:
Vancouver Sun

Gods of Greece must be pleased with Influence
Peter Birnie, Vancouver Sun
Published: Sunday, November 09, 2008

Review: A delicious trip into history awaits with the world premiere of Influence. Janet Munsil has written a winner, one which is sure to have a healthy future when it’s tidied up just a titch.

Just as John Keats was obsessed with the gods of ancient Greece, Munsil wraps herself up in an intoxicatingly self-conscious study of what drove the romantic poet, and indeed drives all great artists, to become beholden to their muses. Katrina Dunn does a terrific job of directing this fast-paced romp ’round artistic licence, drawing precise and near-perfect performances from her talented cast.
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A new play aims to tell a new story, based around the story of the Elgin Marbles.

From:
The Vancouver Province

Succumbing to Influence
Director says starting fresh is satisfying
Lynn Mitges, The Province
Published: Monday, November 03, 2008

In a brand-new work, director Katrina Dunn has to balance pathos, drama and farce in real-time and in one place.

Dunn, artistic director for Touchstone Theatres, says that this form of theatre is unusual and part of the charm of Victoria playwright Janet Munsil’s new work. Influence eschews the common filmic fashion, which is characterized by back-and-forth snippets of time.
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The donation of artefacts back to Canada by the Elgin family has now been delayed by the British Government. One fears that any return decision on the Elgin Marbles would probably suffer a similar fate.

From:
Ottawa Citizen

Red tape likely to delay Elgin artifacts display
Library and Archives’ acquisitions yet to receive OK from Britain
Paul Gessell, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Saturday, April 26, 2008

Library and Archives Canada held a news conference yesterday to announce it has acquired, through a combination of donation and purchase, thousands of personal letters, state documents, paintings and other artifacts owned by Lord Elgin, governor general from 1847-1854.

The announcement was somewhat premature. Britain still has not given the green light for the export of all the loot.
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The remains of over one hundred of their ancestors have been returned to the Haida First Nations tribe in Canada by Chicago’s Field Museum.

From:
Times Colonist (Canada)

The Homecoming
Haida rejoice as ancestral bones return to rest
Jack Knox
Times Colonist

OLD MASSETT, Queen Charlotte Islands – They carried the 46 boxes of bones out of St. John’s Anglican church and drove them to the cemetery Saturday — past the totem poles towering out of the earth, past the hip and funky Haida Rose Cafe, past the weather-beaten homes with the red Haida Nation flags drooping in the rain.

Not a long drive, certainly not as long as the long haul to Chicago, from where the Haida just retrieved the remains of close to 150 ancestors snatched from their resting places in the name of science a century ago. The bones had spent the last 100 years packed away in the Field Museum of Natural History, where they had been taken after being scooped up by anthropologists.
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