Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum in London, was recently quoted in the British newspaper The Guardian as saying, "Repatriation is yesterday's question. Questions of ownership depend on the thought that an object can only be in one place. That's no longer true."
Repatriation, a term often used in reference to the return of museum owned artifacts to their people or nation of origin, was, in many ways the dominant topic of discussion among museums in the 1990's. With the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990, the issue of repatriation in the United States was pushed to the fore. The new law required museums to complete inventories of their collections and consult with Native American tribes considering the possible return of identifiable human remains, as well as objects considered sacred or of cultural patrimony. While the new NAGPRA regulations only apply to federally
recognized tribes in the United States, the return of museum objects to tribes within the borders of America certainly impacted the idea of international repatriation.
During the 1990's, indigenous people as well as several non-indigenous nation states across the world renewed their efforts to have objects returned from many of the large museums of Europe and the United States. Not only have the Maori requested the return of their ancestral remains from museums outside of their homeland, the Peruvians have requested the return of artifacts from Machu Picchu collected by Yale University, and the Italian government recently requested the return of several vases made in Ancient Greece which they now believe were looted from Italian soil. The British Museum, however, has perhaps dealt with some of the most iconic repatriation requests having rebuffed both Greece and Egypt for the return of their own historic cultural objects. Many people view the objects held by museums as a consequence of colonialism and therefore view museums like the British Museum as one of the negative purveyors of colonial power.
But is repatriation really yesterday's question, as the Director of the British Museum argues? The past year alone has seen the aforementioned examples of Peru threatening to sue Yale University, the Italian request for the return of vases, and a jump in the amount of NAGPRA activity in the United States.
On March 28th 2006, just a few days before the Director of the British Museum declared the issue of repatriation dead, the same newspaper ran a story about the British Museum's repatriation of two Tasmanian Aboriginal kangaroo skin bundles filled with human ash to the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre.
Rather than yesterday's question, the issue of repatriation, both in an international context and within the borders of the United States, remains one of the most crucial issues that museums face today.
