What does repatriation mean for Scottish museums?

By Susan Mansfield, 04.08.2022

Ghost Dance Shirt Ⓒ Glasgow Museums.

When Glasgow City Council voted in April to repatriate more than 50 objects from the Glasgow Museums collection to three different countries, the announcement sent ripples through the museum sector. The largest group of artefacts ever repatriated from Scotland, it signals that the debate around returning objects in UK museums to their countries of origin is here to stay.

Some 25 of these objects are being returned to the Lakota Sioux peoples of South Dakota, to whom Glasgow returned a seminal Ghost Dance Shirt in 1999, the first major repatriation from Scotland. However, the announcement also included 17 Benin bronzes, the current hot topic in the restitution world, and seven Indian antiquities.

It suggests that attitudes towards repatriation in the UK are gradually shifting. Last year, the National Museums of Scotland became the first national museum to change its policies, indicating that it would now consider “requests for the permanent transfer of collection objects to non-UK claimants… where the request meets certain criteria”.

But the subject still divides the museum world. Though the British Museum recently called for a Parthenon partnership,' which would see the Elgin Marbles ‘shared’ with Greece, the institution has consistently refused to bow to pressure on the issue of repatriation. This was backed in March 2021 by Boris Johnston, who quashed any hopes of the return of the Parthenon marbles to Greece saying they had been “legally acquired” by Lord Elgin and were “legally owned” by the museum. Some within the sector still fear that widespread restitution claims could “open the floodgates”.

Director of Glasgow Museums Duncan Dornan said the fact that the three groups of objects were being sent back at the same time was largely coincidental as all three had involved lengthy negotiations, but said there is a greater openness in the museum sector to the idea of repatriation. “It’s a slow burn, but there’s a recognition at play and the need to respond in an appropriate way.”

Glasgow Museums was the first institution in Scotland to draw up criteria for repatriation, which have since been adopted by other museums. These cover the status of the party making the repatriation request, the significance of the object and whether there is continuity with the original culture in which it was made, as well as the process by which the object came to be in the museum. “We had another criteria which was about the future of the object when it was returned, but we dropped that as we feel that’s not appropriate,” Dornan says. “If one accepts one no longer has a right to the object, what they do with it is their business not ours.”

He said the negotiation process was often lengthy and complex. “A significant part of the work is in building relationships internationally. A formal repatriation request often happens quite well through the procedure. It’s a very complex nuanced process and it’s important to evolve the best outcome for the object and the community, not to impose what we in the West think is important.”

He added that potential repatriation issues affect only a small number of objects in Glasgow Museums’ collection. “We don’t think of repatriation as a floodgate because the number of objects from international sources in our collection is relatively modest. Other institutions might have a different balance.”

The origins of repatriation lay with indigenous communities in North America, Australia and New Zealand seeking the return of artefacts (often sacred objects or the remains of ancestors) from museums in their own countries. Gradually, attention turned to objects held internationally, such as the Ghost Dance Shirt, believed to have been worn at the Battle of Wounded Knee.

More recently, the focus has shifted towards objects acquired in the colonial era, with the Benin bronzes the most high profile example. Some 2,500 of these treasures were looted in 1897 when British troops ransacked and burned the Benin Royal Palace in retaliation for an ambush which killed a party of Europeans, and many found their way into western museums. Since Nigeria became independent in 1960, various attempts have been made to get the bronzes returned.

The University of Aberdeen became the first western museum to agree to fully repatriate a Benin bronze (which was returned in Oct 2021). Neil Curtis, head of museums and special collections at Aberdeen University, said: “We had been aware of it for years. There had been discussions about trying to return it in the 1990s but we couldn’t establish the right connections in Nigeria. We decided there is real, clear evidence that this was looted in a violent, dreadful way. What do we do with stolen property? We return it to the owner.”

Unusually, the museum took the initiative on the repatriation, but it still took years to make the right connections. “It’s not just a matter of saying, ‘Let’s return it, that makes us feel good’. No museum had returned one, and no-one had made a claim. It took years, but eventually we got in touch with a professor of law in Nigeria. Then we were able to work towards a formal claim from the Nigerian Federal Government, supported by the National Museum of Nigeria and the court of the Oba.”

Major museums around the world have now returned or are negotiating to return Benin bronzes, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Smithsonian in Washington, the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris and the Ethnographical Museum in Berlin, which holds the second largest group in the world (the British Museum holds the largest).

Curtis said that dealing with repatriation requests is likely to become part of museum life going forward, and that criteria need to remain flexible. “I think it is going to be a permanent part of working in museums, we continue to collect and we continue to return. We are going to see more claims from Africa and the Carribbean, as thinking about the legacies of colonies, empire and the slave trade becomes more and more high profile.”

The majority of UK museums were founded in the colonial era, based on Victorian thinking about the preserving the past and the artefacts of other cultures in perpetuity, to educate and inform western audiences. The 21st century has brought a process of rethinking the role of a museum, as well as rethinking how stories are told about colonial histories. Repatriation of objects could become part of much larger discussions on restitution.

For smaller museums, however, struggling to manage large historical collections on shrinking budgets, repatriation is often too thorny a subject even to consider. The artist Anthony Schrag, who is senior lecturer in arts management and cultural policy at Queen Margaret University, said: “When you have to work through a long process about what objects should be returned, where are they going to go and who should they go to, as well as go through the challenges of deaccessioning an object from the collection, why even start? It’s easier to keep them in storage and hope the problem can stay under wraps. I think most people understand repatriation is valuable, but they might not have the resources to do it properly. If you are committed to this at all, you can’t enter into a partial conversation.”

The issue brings into sharp relief the different value systems around preserving objects. Schrag gave the example of a funeral garment from Tonga, which is made of straw and was meant to decay, which has been preserved in a Scottish museum and is now one of the last surviving examples of its kind. “If it were to be returned, should it be allowed to decay, as its maker originally intended? There is a sense of different value systems competing.”

A way forward is to look at how to collaborate with other cultures in ways which benefit both. “Rather than thinking about it in binary terms - if we give everything back, we’ll have nothing - can we think about things as collaborative, nuanced experiences? Cultural exchange is not binary. If it’s right and proper to return something, can we start a conversation about new things which could come to us on loan, or how our curators could learn more about the objects we have?”

A heart-warming example of cultural exchange followed the return of a sacred headdress from Aberdeen University Museums to the Kainai people of western Canada in 2003. The keeper of the headdress, who dances in it at the sundance each year, ordered a Bonnie Prince Charlie jacket to wear in the dance. Neil Curtis says: “He wanted to acknowledge it’s time in Scotland, which is now part of its history.”