Open Collections

LaMaskin, Aaron

University of British Columbia

Repatriation is the act of returning tangible and intangible cultural heritage from museum collections back into the care of the Indigenous Peoples who created them. However, the process of claiming heritage items held in museums is not always simple. Instead, disagreements between Indigenous Peoples and museums about the timeline and proof provided for repatriations can lead to the creation and submission of a repatriation claim becoming a complex and tense effort. This thesis examines a case study of repatriation claims made by the Gitxaała Nation to the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), highlighting points of friction that occurred during the process. In doing so, it explores inter-community collaborations, and the sharing of authority and power within the repatriation claims process. Incorporating the Author’s work as a member of the Gitxaała Nation’s repatriation research team, alongside other scholarly works that detail models of Indigenous Peoples’ and Museums’ engagements and methodologies for collaboration, this thesis discusses the neo-colonial elements of the processes governing repatriation claims-making between a Canadian First Nation and a United States Museum. This thesis argues that understanding repatriation claims as a form of autoethnography can guide the development of an Indigenized repatriation protocol in museums and thus offer an alternative to the contemporary protocol used in the process of repatriation.

Text

2024-09-05

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/89181

Anthropology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/