Return from the Ethnological Museum to Native People in Alaska decided
Press release from 12/18/2017
The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation will return nine objects from the collection of the Ethnological Museum of the National Museums in Berlin to the Chugach Alaska Corporation. The Board of Trustees today approved a corresponding proposal by the President.
The artefacts are grave goods from Native people from south-west Alaska. They were among the objects brought to Berlin by Johan Adrian Jacobsen, who travelled the American north-west coast and Alaska between 1882 and 1884 on behalf of the then Royal Museum of Ethnology (now the Ethnological Museum).
Hermann Parzinger, President of the SPK, said: "The objects were taken from the graves of their deceased without the consent of the Native people and therefore unlawfully, so they do not belong in our museums. We will now return them to the Chugach Alaska Corporation, with whom we have been working on the reprocessing of our collection since 2015."
The artefacts are grave goods from Chenega Island and the now unknown site of Sanradna. They include two broken masks and a child's cradle, as well as a wooden idol. Masks were usually burnt after use or placed in graves, which is why not many Chugach masks still exist today. The red colour on them indicates the burial context. The wooden idol is probably a shamanic figure that was supposed to protect people from danger and death.
In November 2015, a delegation from the Chugach Alaska Corporation visited the Ethnological Museum with the aim of initiating cooperation for future projects. One of the reasons for this was the interest in creating a virtual collection of all Chugach artefacts worldwide. The Corporation then asked the Ethnological Museum for support in repatriating any burial artefacts from the region. The Chugach Alaska Corporation (www.chugach-ak.com) has been representing the interests of the Native people of the Chugach region in Alaska since 1972. Among other things, it is committed to preserving the cultural heritage of these groups. The US government supported the request for restitution by means of a diplomatic note.
In accordance with its basic approach to dealing with its non-European collections and researching provenance, the SPK carefully examined the context from which the burial objects in the Ethnological Museum originated. In the present case, there is every indication that the objects originate from a grave looting and not from an authorised archaeological excavation. It is clear from Adrian Jacobsen's travel diaries that the graves were opened for the sole purpose of removing their contents. There were no official or state authorisations for this, nor was the consent of the community of origin documented. It was against this background that the decision to return the graves was made.
At the end of the 19th century,Johan Adrian Jacobsen travelled the American Northwest Coast and Alaska for the Berlin Ethnological Museum. The director of the museum, Adolf Bastian, had commissioned him to collect objects that were as "original" as possible and uninfluenced by European culture in order to build up a collection. Jacobsen brought around 3000 objects from the Northwest Coast and around 4000 objects from Alaska to Berlin. His report on the journey is an impressive contemporary document. However, it is characterised less by precise ethnographic observation than by the adventure narrative of a hard-boiled daredevil. Against this background, the journey of the self-proclaimed "captain" will also be at the centre of an exhibition module at the Humboldt Forum, in the sense of a critical examination of the history of the collection from today's perspective.