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Rights to a Culture: Illinois' experiences cast repatriation of cultural items in a better light

In mid-September, a delegation of high-ranking officials from Kenya met with representatives of the Illinois State Museum in a ceremony marked by many speeches and group photographs. Center stage, displayed in a lined box, was the kigango, a decorated wooden post that was part of the museum's collection before officials there learned last spring it originally had been stolen from a Kenyan family. 

 The delegation that traveled to Illinois to accept the statue on behalf of the family included three representatives from the National Museums of Kenya; Suleiman Shakombo, the Minister of State for National Heritage; and the Kenyan ambassador to the United States, Peter Ogego. The Kenyan officials took a tour of the museum's exhibits, and Illinois State Museum representatives are invited to attend the ceremony in Kenya in which the kigango will be presented to the family.

"We were really excited by the interest from the Kenyan government in the whole ceremony," says Bonnie Styles, director of the Illinois State Museum. 

"We thought it went very well. The whole interaction was just incredibly positive and uplifting."

Such incidents have cast a more favorable light in Illinois on the repatriation of cultural items from other countries, a contentious issue for museums that has drawn national attention in recent years.

Several nations, including Greece and Italy, are seeking artifacts that have long been held in American museums. Both countries claim many antiquities held at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and at other U.S. institutions were illicitly taken outside their borders. 

Museums have phrased their responses to such claims carefully, with many only saying they will consider them on a case-by-case basis.

In 2001, questions arose about whether artwork at the Art Institute of Chicago had been stolen from its original owners by Nazis during World War II. For several years, the museum has been researching the ownership history, or provenance, of European paintings and sculptures in its collection that were acquired in the period between 1933 and 1945.

Countries' requests for return and claims of museums holding looted artifacts has drawn increased media attention, putting added pressure on institutions to watch their steps.

"There's been these big, very public bad acts of institutions [having looted or stolen materials], so people have probably seen those," says Helen Robbins, repatriation specialist at the Field Museum in Chicago.

Some institutions are disputing the source countries' ownership claims on pieces held in their collections. Hampton University in Virginia, to which the Kenyan family's second kigango was traced, at first refused to return it, claiming there was no proof of ownership. Faced with negative media attention, the university finally agreed to send it to Kenya on permanent loan, still arguing the item was legally acquired. For other institutions, caution has become the rule. 

"We all know there's some unscrupulous dealers out there," says Douglas Brewer, director of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Spurlock Museum and an archaeologist who has traveled to the Middle East. "And it happens here in North America all the time, too."

Museums turn to two documents for guidelines when acquiring artifacts from other countries: the 2004 report released by the Association of Art Museum Directors, an organization that includes 175 directors of large art museums in the United States, Canada and Mexico, and the UNESCO Convention of 1970.

The museum directors' association report, which lays out guidelines on collecting archaeological materials and ancient art, was issued in response to escalating international concerns that museums were acquiring art that was illegally obtained from the countries of origin. It states that director members should "balance the obligation to preserve and provide public access to the world's shared artistic heritage with the duty to collect responsibly."

The report also recommends that museums research the provenance of a work of art before acquisition and obtain as much information and written documentation as possible from sellers and donors. 

The guidelines are not binding and instruct museums to use their own judgment in acquisition cases where enough information cannot be obtained. Still, many museums follow them.

"With respect to new acquisitions, we do apply the [association of museum directors] guidelines in our review of objects we are considering acquiring," says Chai Lee, spokesman at the Art Institute of Chicago. 

Other large museums, recognizing their increasingly high profile in the eyes of the public, have established their own firm policies on acquisition. 

"We make a strong statement on ethics and collecting. We have a policy of no collecting from dubious sources," says Robbins of the Field Museum. "We're not going to be like certain institutions and just buy anything."

The UNESCO Convention of 1970, which has been ratified or accepted by more than 100 countries, is aimed at preventing the illicit import and export of cultural property from nations. Under the convention, countries can request special restrictions on the trafficking of their cultural items.

Kenya, one of the recent countries to ratify the convention, is seeking these restrictions. This year, that African nation designated its vigango (plural of kigango) statues "inalienable" or "singular" objects. Under the convention, such items cannot be trafficked to other countries.

"The designation means that these objects stand for the core identity of that nation, something that would never enter our imagination to be sold, like the Liberty Bell or the Declaration of Independence for Americans," says Monica Udvardy, a University of Kentucky anthropologist who played a key role in demonstrating the stolen vigango's ownership.

The convention also states that museums should not acquire any works of ancient art of questionable provenance or known to have been removed in contravention of the country of origin's laws after 1970. But, because the United States did not ratify the convention until 1983, different museums use different cutoff dates in their individual policies. Many institutions have not officially set dates at all.

The museum directors' guidelines and the UNESCO convention do not address the return of artifacts already held in museums' collections. In the United States, the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation 

Act provides for the return of specific Native American cultural items to their descendants. But this law only concerns repatriation to tribes within the United States. No international accord deals with the issue of repatriation of artifacts to countries of origin. 

Such a law, Lee says, "would never happen as a practical matter."

Consequently, many museums have no set policies on returning items that are sought by other nations. Lee says that the Art Institute "review[s] each case individually."

In 2002, the Art Institute of Chicago was one of 18 international museums to sign a statement titled Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums. The authors of the document argued that the role of museums is to serve and preserve the heritage of all nations, not just one. It states that "objects acquired in earlier times must be viewed in the light of different sensitivities and values, reflective of the earlier era," and that "museums too provide a valid and valuable context for objects that were long ago displaced from their original source."

The question of whether current standards should be retroactively applied to items that museums acquired decades ago is one that many older institutions are facing. And the source information of long-held items in collections can be difficult to trace.

"Every museum has things that predate the convention," says Styles of the Illinois State Museum, which opened in 1877. "The farther you go back, probably the less documentation you might have of how some things were actually acquired."

Museums that are newer or smaller may have a better ability to ensure their compliance with guidelines. This is so at UIUC's Spurlock Museum, which has been open four years and is undergoing the museums' accreditation process.

"We are well aware of the issues, but the museum hasn't been in a position, hasn't been around long enough, to have acquired those types of artifacts that other institutions are dealing with," says Brewer, the museum's director.

Still, the museum is carefully sifting through the more than 42,000 pieces in its collection to make sure they were legally obtained before the Spurlock acquired them.

"State-controlled museums probably keep very, very tight policies," Brewer says. "To have a problem arise would not be good for the museum, or for the university, so we pay close attention to it."

Illinois has seen two landmark cases in which agreements for the return of cultural items held by museums have been made with uncharacteristic ease and good will. 

When the Field Museum repatriated human remains and funerary objects to the Haida people of British Columbia in 2003, a Haida delegation performed a ceremonial celebration dance at the museum, and museum staff later traveled to the Haida's home, the Queen Charlotte Islands. At the state museum, circumstances aligned to allow the kigango's return. "Everything was so clear-cut for us," Styles says. "Here there was a clear link that this was a piece that belonged to a particular individual, with photographic documentation of it."

Still, Styles says that the interaction with Kenyan representatives has cleared the way for continued communication. 

"I think we made some lasting relationships. We had a lot of really engaging conversations. Certainly there are a lot of common interests among those of us who work in museums." 

 


Illinois Issues, December 2006

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