Clark’s First Nations repatriation plan a ‘ploy,’ Haida curator says

[Regional chief of B.C. Assembly of First Nations Shane Gottfriedson speaks as B.C. Premier Christy Clark and others look on during an announcement at the Royal B.C. Museum in Victoria, B.C., on June 21, 2016. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chad Hipolito]

British Columbia Premier Christy Clark stood recently in front of a Haida totem pole and announced a provincial appeal for U.S. museums to return First Nations artifacts and ancestral remains to B.C. aboriginal groups.

Clark released a letter she’d written to U.S. President Barack Obama, urging the repatriation of indigenous collections.

It was announced on National Aboriginal Day and it all seemed quite copacetic — a huge step toward so-called reconciliation.

Except that the Haida — arguably the leading authorities on indigenous repatriation in North America — didn’t know about it.

And the curator of the internationally renowned Haida Heritage Museum fears Clark’s unwelcome foray could do more harm than good to long-running international negotiations.

“Christy Clark is being so patronizing, acting as an agent on behalf of First Nations,” says Nika Collison. “No one’s approached us.

“That whole thing is a farce.”

Collison calls the announcement a “ploy” to distract from the huge divide between B.C. First Nations and the provincial government over LNG (liquefied natural gas).

“I see her using this critical component of our lives — one that provides a pathway to healing and righting the wrongs of the past and finding a way to move forward together — using that shamelessly to divert from the fact that she’s going to destroy the environment,” Collison tells Yahoo Canada News.

“It makes it appear as if she’s working with all these First Nations, that we’re all working harmoniously together when that’s not the fact.”

The Haida have been working with museums around the world for 40 years on repatriating Haida artifacts and ancestral remains.

They are aware of more than 12,000 items held in more than 130 institutions, most of them in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Last week, flanked by a dozen First Nations leaders at the Royal B.C. Museum, Clark said it is long past time that items of spiritual significance come home.

“It is time for those institutions that have taken them away to give them back,” Clark says.

The premier has written to Obama asking him to extend to B.C. the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act that makes it law to return human remains. She said the law should go beyond human remains.

"These items and remains should be returned to their original home, according to the wishes of indigenous peoples,” Clark’s letter stated. “It is the moral thing to do.”

Laura Peers, the curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum and a professor of anthropology at Oxford University, has been working with the Haida for years.

Peers says looking at repatriation as the physical return of objects is too simplistic.

“While repatriation is needed in some cases (ancestral remains, items needed for ceremonial use), what is needed far more often is access,” she says in an email exchange.

“People quite rightly want access to their material heritage.

“If we could get collections circulating more, find ways of making loans less expensive, that would take us in a more productive direction than simply the tug of war over legal ownership.”

A group of Haida artists and elders have been hosted by the Pitt Rivers Museum, in order to give them a chance to touch and explore items held at the museum. They are currently negotiating a loans program.

Because the truth is that the Haida do not have the funds [there is no provincial or federal funding for repatriation] or the capacity to take back all of the thousands of items from around the world. And they, at least, have a proper museum with trained staff.

“It’s not as cut and dry and ‘give us our stuff back,’” Collison says.

More than 500 sets of ancestral remains have been returned to the Haida in the past two decades, from 11 museums and four private collections.

The Haida Heritage Centre is built on repatriation. Collison estimates that 95 per cent of the nation’s material culture had left the islands.

Under colonial laws, indigenous groups were not allowed to practise their culture and museum pieces in some cases are the only repository of technology and information that was lost during the residential school era.

“They’ve been good homes to our pieces. The people who are in the museums, it’s not their fault,” Collison says.