Showing 4 results for the tag: First Nations.

October 18, 2010

Canadian First Nations Haida ancestral reburial in British Columbia

Posted at 9:09 pm in Similar cases

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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February 8, 2009

Retrieving Blackfoot artefacts

Posted at 1:49 pm in Similar cases

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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November 3, 2003

Haida bones returned by Chicago’s Field Museum

Posted at 9:19 am in Similar cases

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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September 19, 2003

Namgis First Nations tribe ask British Museum to return masks

Posted at 8:13 am in British Museum, Similar cases

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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