For curious people, museums are great places to explore. But increasingly, museums have come under fire for displaying items from faraway places that, in some cases, may have been stolen. Commentator Rex Buchanan recently traveled to a massive museum in Great Britain and found something utterly unexpected.
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For a long time now, I’ve wanted to visit the British Museum in London. I finally made it there in late March. The place is overwhelming, massive, displaying artifacts from around the world. But the Museum has developed a checkered history, mainly because of its refusal to return some artifacts to their place of origin.
Probably the best known example is the Parthenon or Elgin marbles, statues taken from the Parthenon in Greece in the early 1800s. The Greeks have even built a museum of their own to house the marbles, should they be returned. Thus far, no dice. Similarly, the Benin bronzes are metal works from West Africa that were created in the 16th century and acquired by the British in 1897. So far the British Museum has decided to keep them.
Conversations about the ownership and repatriation of artifacts is fraught and delicate. In recent years, more museums have returned artifacts to their place of origin. The Denver Museum of Nature and Science has closed its North American Cultures Hall and is talking with Indigenous leaders about their artifacts.
It’s hard to avoid contemplating all this while walking the halls of the British Museum. Signage there doesn’t say much about repatriation of artifacts. Yet to me it was the elephant in the room.
Then we wandered into the museum’s North American wing. There, on one wall, hung a bow from the Kanza people. Made in the mid 1800s, the wooden bow was about 4 feet long, with blue beads decorating part of the handle.
The Museum’s website says it was probably ceremonial and not made for hunting or use as a weapon. So how did it wind up here? The website says it came from an ethnographic dealer based in Hamburg, Germany, in the 1800s. From there, it’s hard to trace the bow’s provenance back any farther. The German company bought artifacts from traders and collectors, then apparently sold the bow to the British Museum.
I don’t much about the bow beyond all this. But I do know that it was striking, maybe a little shocking, to see this object that was miles from home, displayed in a huge building in a crowded urban landscape so different from the rolling hills where it came from.
Seeing the bow, the fight over artifact repatriation now seemed a little less academic. Now I understood a little better the nations and indigenous people whose artifacts are on display so far from home.
Why, I wondered, was something from our part of the world on display here? Was the Museum doing the world a service by preserving and displaying the bow so it could be appreciated by people from all over the world? Or should the bow go back to the Kanza? Should it even be displayed at all? Who really owns the bow?
These questions don’t just apply to the British Museum, but all museums, it seems to me. Conversations about artifacts, and decisions about their disposition, are difficult, delicate, and long, long overdue. ####
Commentator Rex Buchanan is a writer, author and director emeritus of the Kansas Geological Survey. He lives in Lawrence.