Why museums are returning cultural treasures

Archaeologist and curator Chip Colwell collects artifacts for his museum, but he also returns them to where they came from. In a thought-provoking talk, he shares how some museums are confronting their legacies of stealing spiritual objects and pillaging ancient graves -- and how they're bridging divides with communities who are demanding the return of their cultural treasures.

A confession:

I am an archaeologist
and a museum curator,

but a paradoxical one.

For my museum, I collect things,

but I also return things
back to where they came from.

I love museums because
they're social and educational,

but I'm most drawn to them
because of the magic of objects:

a one-million-year-old hand axe,

a totem pole, an impressionist painting

all take us beyond our own imaginations.

In museums, we pause to muse,
to gaze upon our human empire of things

in meditation and wonder.

I understand why US museums alone

host more than 850 million
visits each year.

Yet, in recent years, museums
have become a battleground.

Communities around the world
don't want to see their culture

in distant institutions
which they have no control over.

They want to see their cultural treasures

repatriated, returned
to their places of origin.

Greece seeks the return
of the Parthenon Marbles,

a collection of classical sculptures
held by the British Museum.

Egypt demands antiquities from Germany.

New Zealand's Maori want to see returned

ancestral tattooed heads
from museums everywhere.

Yet these claims pale in comparison
to those made by Native Americans.

Already, US museums have returned
more than one million artifacts

and 50,000 sets
of Native American skeletons.

To illustrate what's at stake,
let's start with the War Gods.

This is a wood carving

made by members
of the Zuni tribe in New Mexico.

In the 1880s, anthropologists
began to collect them

as evidence of American Indian religion.

They came to be seen as beautiful,

the precursor to the stark sculptures
of Picasso and Paul Klee,

helping to usher in
the modern art movement.

From one viewpoint, the museum
did exactly as it's supposed to

with the War God.

It helped introduce
a little-known art form

for the world to appreciate.

But from another point of view,

the museum had committed
a terrible crime of cultural violence.

For Zunis, the War God
is not a piece of art,

it is not even a thing.

It is a being.

For Zunis, every year,

priests ritually carve new War Gods,

the Ahayu:da,

breathing life into them
in a long ceremony.

They are placed on sacred shrines

where they live to protect the Zuni people

and keep the universe in balance.

No one can own or sell a War God.

They belong only to the earth.

And so Zunis want them back from museums

so they can go to their shrine homes

to fulfill their spiritual purpose.

What is a curator to do?

I believe that the War Gods
should be returned.

This might be a startling answer.

After all, my conclusion
contradicts the refrain

of the world's most famous archaeologist:

"That belongs in a museum!"

(Laughter)

is what Indiana Jones said,
not just to drive movie plots,

but to drive home the unquestionable good
of museums for society.

I did not come to my view easily.

I grew up in Tucson, Arizona,

and fell in love
with the Sonoran Desert's past.

I was amazed that beneath
the city's bland strip malls

was 12,000 years of history
just waiting to be discovered.

When I was 16 years old,
I started taking archaeology classes

and going out on digs.

A high school teacher of mine
even helped me set up my own laboratory

to study animal bones.

But in college,

I came to learn that my future career
had a dark history.

Starting in the 1860s,

Native American skeletons
became a tool for science,

collected in the thousands

to prove new theories
of social and racial hierarchies.

Native American human remains
were plundered from graves,

even taken fresh from battlefields.

When archaeologists
came across white graves,

the skeleton was often quickly reburied,

while Native bones were deposited
as specimens on museum shelves.

In the wake of war, stolen land,
boarding schools,

laws banning religion,

anthropologists collected sacred objects

in the belief that Native peoples
were on the cusp of extinction.

You can call it racism or colonialism,
but the labels don't matter

as much as the fact
that over the last century,

Native American rights and culture
were taken from them.

In 1990, after years of Native protests,

the US government,
through the US Congress,

finally passed a law that allowed
Native Americans to reclaim

cultural items, sacred objects
and human remains from museums.

Many archaeologists were panicked.

For scientists,

it can be hard to fully grasp
how a piece of wood can be a living god

or how spirits surround bones.

And they knew that modern science,
especially with DNA,

can provide luminous insights
into the past.

As the anthropologist
Frank Norwick declared,

"We are doing important work
that benefits all of mankind.

We are not returning anything to anyone."

As a college student,
all of this was an enigma

that was hard to decipher.

Why did Native Americans
want their heritage back

from the very places preserving it?

And how could scientists
spend their entire lives

studying dead Indians

but seem to care so little
about living ones?

I graduated but wasn't sure
what to do next,

so I traveled.

One day, in South Africa,

I visited Nelson Mandela's
former prison cell on Robben Island.

I had an epiphany.

Here was a man who helped
a country bridge vast divides

to seek, however imperfectly,
reconciliation.

I'm no Mandela, but I ask myself:

Could I, too, plant seeds of hope
in the ruins of the past?

In 2007, I was hired as a curator

at the Denver Museum
of Nature and Science.

Our team agreed that unlike
many other institutions,

we needed to proactively confront
the legacy of museum collecting.

We started with
the skeletons in our closet,

100 of them.

After months and then years,
we met with dozens of tribes

to figure out how to get
these remains home.

And this is hard work.

It involves negotiating
who will receive the remains,

how to respectfully transfer them,

where will they go.

Native American leaders
become undertakers,

planning funerals for dead relatives
they had never wanted unearthed.

A decade later, the Denver Museum
and our Native partners

have reburied nearly all
of the human remains in the collection.

We have returned
hundreds of sacred objects.

But I've come to see
that these battles are endless.

Repatriation is now a permanent feature
of the museum world.

Hundreds of tribes are waiting their turn.

There are always
more museums with more stuff.

Every catalogued War God
in an American public museum

has now been returned -- 106, so far --

but there are more
beyond the reach of US law,

in private collections
and outside our borders.

In 2014, I had the chance to travel
with a respected religious leader

from the Zuni tribe
named Octavius Seowtewa

to visit five museums
in Europe with War Gods.

At the Ethnological Museum of Berlin,

we saw a War God
with a history of dubious care.

An overly enthusiastic curator
had added chicken feathers to it.

Its necklace had once been stolen.

At the Musée du quai Branly in Paris,

an official told us that the War God there
is now state property

with no provisions for repatriation.

He insisted that the War God
no longer served Zunis

but museum visitors.

He said, "We give all
of the objects to the world."

At the British Museum,

we were warned that the Zuni case
would establish a dangerous precedent

for bigger disputes,

such as the Parthenon Marbles,
claimed by Greece.

After visiting the five museums,

Octavius returned home
to his people empty-handed.

He later told me,

"It hurts my heart to see
the Ahayu:da so far away.

They all belong together.

It's like a family member
that's missing from a family dinner.

When one is gone,
their strength is broken."

I wish that my colleagues
in Europe and beyond

could see that the War Gods
do not represent the end of museums

but the chance for a new beginning.

When you walk the halls of a museum,

you're likely just seeing
about one percent

of the total collections.

The rest is in storage.

Even after returning
500 cultural items and skeletons,

my museum still retains 99.999 percent
of its total collections.

Though we no longer have War Gods,

we have Zuni traditional pottery,

jewelry, tools, clothing and arts.

And even more precious than these objects

are the relationships that we formed
with Native Americans

through the process of repatriation.

Now, we can ask Zunis
to share their culture with us.

Not long ago, I had the chance
to visit the returned War Gods.

A shrine sits up high atop a mesa
overlooking beautiful Zuni homeland.

The shrine is enclosed
by a roofless stone building

threaded at the top with barbed wire

to ensure that they're not stolen again.

And there they are, inside,

the Ahayu:da,

106 War Gods amid offerings
of turquoise, cornmeal, shell,

even T-shirts ...

a modern gift to ancient beings.

And standing there,

I got a glimpse at the War Gods'
true purpose in the world.

And it occurred to me then

that we do not get to choose
the histories that we inherit.

Museum curators today
did not pillage ancient graves

or steal spiritual objects,

but we can accept responsibility
for correcting past mistakes.

We can help restore dignity,

hope and humanity to Native Americans,

the very people who were once
the voiceless objects of our curiosity.

And this doesn't even require us
to fully understand others' beliefs,

only that we respect them.

Museums are temples to things past.

Now they must also become
places for living cultures.

As I turned to walk away from the shrine,

I drank in the warm summer air,

and I watched an eagle
turn lazy circles high above.

I thought of the Zunis,

whose offerings ensure
that their culture is not dead and gone

but alive and well,

and I could think of no better place
for the War Gods to be.

Thank you.

(Applause)