Page 40 - EXPOTIME!Sept2017

From the newsdesk

by one of the members. www.kirchliche-museen.org comed home Māori and Moriori remains long held in
European museums. The repatriation of the bones,
● An absurd situation: on a miniblogging service, mi- which were exhumed or taken without permission
ni-information is discussed on object cards. As the dis- from their ancestral country, is a step forward in the
cussionn is public with editorial monitoring, with anon- ongoing effort to reverse the colonialist collecting
ymous contributors, it was bound to happen that the practices still evident on the shelves of many Western
museum became misunderstood, attacked, and the sit- institutions. Te Papa received 44 Moriori and Māori
uation got out of control: a recent Twitter discussion, ancestral remains from the Übersee-Museum Bremen
in which the British Museum wanted to convey a posi- in Germany. The Karolinska Institutet in Sweden re-
tive picture about itself and explain how their object turned skulls taken in 1890 and a mummified, tat-
information came about, was led by "a curator of the tooed Māori head.
Asia Department" (a certain "Jane") who posted: "Some-
times Asian names can be confusing, so we have to be ● Beginning in the fall of 2018, the American Wing of
careful about using too many". The discussion devel- the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York will attempt
oped, according to a report from the Huffington Post on to make a major course correction by including Native
14.9.2017, into a mean shitstorm. There were cynical and American Art that has been regrettably missing from the
vicious attacks on "Jane", the museum chose the way to section. Thanks to a donation from collectors Charles
apologize several times, tried to clarify what "Jane" had and Valerie Diker, a batch of 91 works of Native Ameri-
meant in her statement. apologies by the mobocracy, can art will be embellishing the American Wing, marking
however, were missing. The British Museum had fallen a historic change in the way art is curated at New York’s
into the typical trap of the unsocial networks, in which most famous museum. In the past, Native American art
the British Museum was equated with museum-theft, co- has been housed in The Met’s Arts of Africa, Oceania and
lonialism, racism and ethnocentrism. The incident shows the Americas galleries. The Diker collection had already
once again that museum themes can only be discussed been on show at the museum 2016-2017.
seriously in social networks only if it is ensured that they
are not captured by anonymous ideologists, in order to
release aggressions and hate postings. http://www.huff-
ingtonpost.com/entry/british-museum-asian-names-con-
fusing_us_59baf469e4b02da0e14077f5?utm_hp_ref=mu-
seums

● Repatriation of collected human remains is a slow
process, and recent episodes like last year’s auction
of human remains and sacred indigenous objects
by EVE auction house in Paris, as well as the stalled
campaign for the return of the skulls of two Beothuk
people from the National Museums Scotland, demon-
strate how difficult it is to enforce, especially without
dedicated government action. The Native American
Graves Protection and Repatriation Act has helped in
the United States, but even that is limited and only
applies to federally recognized tribes. When Wampa-
noag remains were returned for reinterment this
year in Rhode Island, following a two-decade effort to
track them down in several museums, the not feder-
ally recognized Pokanoket tribe protested that it had
been left out of the process.
Last year, the Smithsonian Institution repatriated the
remains of at least 54 Māori and Moriori people, while
the Beneski Museum in Massachusetts returned a
Māori child’s skull. According to the Guardina approx.
400 individuals had been returned since the initiation
of New Zealand’s government repatriation program in A dress and belt with an awl case by an unrecorded Wasco
1990, yet an estimated 600 remained in institutions artist, made ca. 1870 in Oregon or Washington State. Part
and an unknown number in private hands. The gov- of the promised donation of the Dikers.
ernment mandated Te Papa to form its own repatria- © Charles and Valerie Diker Collection/Photo: Dirk Bakker
tion program in 2003, and the national museum has
since been active in many of the returns. (More museum news under the heading
On May 29, the Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington wel- "New Museums".)

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EXPOTIME!, issue August/September 2017