Another View on Repatriation: Lost to the Public, Lost to History

Abstract

ANDREW GULLIFORD'S ESSAY is part of the growing body of what has been referred to as the literature of political victimization. He presents the view that Indians have ownership rights to museum collections, without considering the traditional educational and public interest concerns which support museums and provide their financing. Facts are carefully selected to portray Anglos and Whites as destroyers and looters, and virtually no credit is given to the many museums which have carefully curated Indian materials, in many cases for generations, nor to the generations of anthropologists whose efforts were responsible for sympathetic recording of what the Indians had to say about their culture. The implication is that everything in American museums was acquired by looting and rapine, while the facts are that major parts of the collections were acquired by the simple process of purchasing them from Indians who sold baskets, pots, peace pipes, and tribal objects. In some cases these objects were sold as commercial ventures; in other cases they were disposed of as Indians became converts to Christianity and no longer believed in the sacred nature of aboriginal artifacts. The famous wampum belts which were repatriated to contemporary claimed descendants included some which were gifts from the Indians to William Penn as part of treaty agreements between the settlers and the Indians. Of course, in politically correct thinking, it is not possible for an Indian to become a Christian, and only native religious beliefs are to be tolerated when it comes to Indian materials. The Heye Foundation museum has become the cornerstone of the new Museum of the American Indian, which would not have anything to cu-