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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A Canadian First Nations group has requested that the British Museum returns some masks that were taken from their ancestors, but the British Museum has declined to consider the case for returning them.

From:
New York Times

ALERT BAY JOURNAL
September 18, 2003
Reclaiming the Stolen Faces of Their Forefathers
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS

ALERT BAY, British Columbia — A local newspaper column last year suggested that the Namgis, a small band of Native Canadians in British Columbia, ought to go to London and steal the Crown Jewels to get some bargaining leverage over the British Museum.

The half facetious idea came after the group had tried diplomacy for several years to get back a beloved wooden mask stolen from them 82 years ago that is now boxed up in a storage room of the museum.
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The Haida Repatriation Committee has been fighting for the return of their ancestral bones from museums around the world. They have already had a lot of successes, but it has been a difficult struggle & there is still a lot further to go.

From:
Globe and Mail

POSTED AT 4:04 AM EDT Saturday, Aug. 16, 2003
Bones of contention
For decades the remains of B.C.’s Haida ancestors have been locked away in metal drawers as specimens in museums around the world. Now, the Haida are fighting to bring them home, ALEXANDRA GILL writes
By ALEXANDRA GILL
From Saturday’s Globe and Mail

SKIDEGATE, B.C. — Andy Wilson has spent the past seven years collecting some very special bones. Bones so precious they can’t be kept here, in the main cemetery, overlooking the tiny town of Skidegate on the Queen Charlotte Islands.

The bones are buried in a sacred grove, somewhere in the spruce forest behind us, explains Wilson, the soft-spoken man who co-chairs the local committee responsible for bringing the human remains of his Haida ancestors back home.
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The recent statements by the Canadian Prime Minster, Jean Chrétien, indicate that he has no idea what is going on in his own government – and more worryingly, that he does not check what is happening, before making statements about issues.

From:
Globe & Mail

Thursday, May. 29, 2003
Elgin Marbles trip up PM in Greece
By SHAWN McCARTHY and JANE TABER
From Thursday’s Globe and Mail

Athens and Ottawa — Prime Minister Jean Chrétien tripped over the Elgin Marbles issue yesterday, not knowing that both the House of Commons and the Senate have adopted motions calling on Britain to return the ancient works of art to Greece.

No help to the Prime Minister, in Athens at the start of an 11-day European visit, was Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham, who also had no clue that on Tuesday the Senate adopted a motion encour­aging the United Kingdom to return the sculptures to Greece before the 2004 Athens Olympics.
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Chicago’s Field Museum is to return bones that were previously dug up from cemeteries on the Queen Charlotte Islands off the coast of British Columbia.

From:
Chicago Sun Times

Field returning bones to native group
March 26, 2003
BY NANCY MOFFETT STAFF REPORTER

The Field Museum will return bones–mostly skulls–from about 160 native people who lived, logged and fished from islands off the coast of British Columbia.

The remains were dug up from cemeteries on the Queen Charlotte Islands and brought to Chicago in the early 1900s. Such returns represent one of the hottest international issues for museums.
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