Decolonize This Place gathered a coalition of over 15 grassroots organisations to attend this years Anti-Columbus Day movement Photo: Zachary Small
While most Americans observed Columbus Day on 14 October, I celebrated Indigenous Peoples Day by protesting alongside other Native Americans. As a citizen of the Cherokee Nation living in New York, I am surrounded by daily reminders of the colonial violence that built the US. Monuments to figures like Christopher Columbus and Theodore Roosevelt, who held racist ideas and pushed genocidal policies, line my path to institutions like the America Museum of Natural History (AMNH).
There is a direct connection between how predominantly white curators have categorised Indigenous peoples as part of “natural history” and how we are misrepresented in contemporary art spaces. When the AMNH was founded in 1869, American empire-building was on the rise, and amateur collectors and anthropologists raided Native burial grounds for specimens that they thought would confirm the eugenic superiority of white Americans. The anthropology collection of the AMNH is built with these stolen bones. Even after the passage of the law in 1990 providing for the repatriation of human remains and cultural patrimony, the bones of more than 100,000 Indigenous people are still held in museums across the US.
Museums must recognise that their “objects” are my ancestors, and that the detainment of those remains inflicts ongoing harm on Native communities.
Arriving on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art during last months protest, we chanted: “They want the art, but not the people.” Museums seem willing to appreciate Indigenous art only if it is detached and decontextualised from its kinfolk. If cultural institutions want Native people to be part of their programmes, they have to first demonstrate that they see us as more than curios and fossilised remains of the past. Decolonisation is not simply a question of returning bodies that have been stolen, but also restoring the Native communities that continue to survive settler invasion.
In Europe, museums are still grappling with the 2018 French government report that called for the repatriation of looted artefacts (including human remains) from Africa. French President Emmanuel Macron has supported restitution, which must also confront the aftermath of colonial war and looting. But in the US, where many museums have become repositories for Native remains, we have had no such dialogue. ThisRead More – Source
