Repatriation & Museums

Digital Repatriation

‘[D]igital repatriation’, whereby libraries, museums and other heritage institutions create electronic surrogates of items that are then theoretically available to the source communities that created them....But more to the point, digital repatriation does not, in and of itself, reverse the politics of the original archive. On the contrary, digital repatriation assumes that ‘the indigenous archive’ is already extant, somewhere – and in the biggest digital archives so far, that somewhere is almost always a colonial space: a non-Native museum, university, library or historical society (Senier, 2014).


'Digital repatriation' is one of those no one can truly define, it can mean so many different things due to the nature of what is 'digital'. "Digital technologies alter repatriation practices by allowing low-cost surrogates of cultural heritage materials to be returned to source communities....Digital surrogates are not intended to be replacements for, or synonymous with, the physical materials they may represent. Instead, digital (or digitized) cultural materials provide an alternative form of and dynamic life for many physical objects" (Christen, 2011).

Over time these digital technologies can be in the form of audio recordings, online databases, photographs, 3D printing and 3D scanning/digitizing of objects. Due to the nature of western digital artifacts, there is usually an underlying principle of open access, public content to many objects being repatriated. This lens of having an expectation that these returned artifacts are available for everyone, and is visible at all times is unethical when considering the transmission of culture knowledge for many indigenous people. In many traditions certain songs, dances, relics, stories is only shared with a specific audience in mind. The filtering and limited access to certain types of traditional knowledge cannot be reflected in the operations and workflows of western style databases. To combat this anthropologist Kimberly Christen has developed software (Murkutu) and traditional knowledge labels to better reflect and transmit information as it is intended by primarily indigenous peoples. This type of access to information also applies to the recreation of physical objects, such as the replication of funeral relics and religious rite items that are from the Smithsonian collections i.e. Tlingit Killer Whale Hat. 

The Killer Whale clan crest hat, or Kéet S’aaxw replication has a long history tied to it. In 1900 the original was carved for Dakl’aweidi leader Gusht’eiheen, or Spray Behind the Dorsal Fin, by his brother-in-law Yéilnaawú, a well-known Deisheetaan clan artist. Several years later, the hat was acquired in 1904 by Smithsonian ethnologist John Swanton—it remained in the Institution’s collections for more than a century. In 2005, the hat was repatriated to the clan leader Mark Jacobs, Jr., an ardent champion of Tlingit cultural preservation efforts. The Killer Whale hat embodies clan ancestors and lets members of the tribe feel the presence of their relatives. “The clan was interested in scanning the hat to archive it digitally,” Eric Hollinger, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History describes. Today clan members are still wary of the digitization process, there is a fear that machines will eventually replace the carvers in the clan, and that their clan crest will be misused once again as it was in the past. Others recognized the value of digitization, and a number of clan leaders even had their crest objects digitally scanned for archival purposes at the 2012 conference. Today, the Smithsonian is still actively engaged in digitization projects, and Hollinger says these collaborative relationships continue (Solly, 2017).

At the same time, the power of 3D printing has also allowed for younger descendents to be able to reclaim part of their history, a history that has been partially lost to their own people. This is the case for Tania Larsson. Larsson is Gwich’in and Swedish and she grew up in Europe with roots in the N.W.T. 's Mackenzie Delta in Canada. She has been featured in Vogue Magazine, interned at the Smithsonian and is currently working as a jewelry artist, speaker, and activist. While studying at the Smithsonian she printed 3D replicas of the tools her ancestors would have used with the idea of bringing it back to her clan to remake with original materials (Wohlberg, 2015). She now lives and resides with her clan in N.W.T. studying traditional ways and trying to engage younger generations of indigenous people. 
 
There are some in the museum world who are excited at the possibilities of having 3D replicas of items to study if there are populations of people who would never be able to visit the original item. "Today, digital technology has democratized the art of copying so it isn't limited to big museums with generous budgets or top experts with specialist knowledge. What's more, digital files of artifacts can be shared online and replicas can be printed in other parts of the world. And most importantly, physically printing a copy from a digital image doesn't depend on whether the original artifact still exists or not" (Samaroudi & Echavarria, 2019). This type of work has already been around since the 19th century when museums produced copies through processes that involved making a mold of the original item, such as casting and electrotyping. Examples of this include the famous diplodocus skeleton "Dippy" which actually exists as a number of copies in museums all over the world (Samaroudi & Echavarria, 2019).

More recently the British Museum has also done a similar project of digitizing their plaster molds of Mayan artifacts brought to them in the 19th century by Alfred Percival Maudslay, a Victorian ‘explorer’. Maudslay used the most up-to-date technologies available to him – dry plate photography and paper and plaster moulding techniques – to record the sculptures he encountered. This digitization project has being completed in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture since 2016 led by Project Curator Kate Jarvis from the British Museum. Over 800 glass plate negatives are still stored at the Museum in their original wooden boxes, created by Maudslay to protect them on their journey through the jungle. Maudslay also created 500 casts of dozens of monuments over the course of 10 years, and multiple trips to the Maya area (Jarvis, 2017).



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