Earlier this year we reported on the international conference From Scotland to the World: Repatriation and Museums which CREATe co-convened with The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, and the Institute of Art and Law (the ‘IAL’). The event, which concerned museum practice relating to the return of artefacts to countries and communities of origin, was held in Kelvin Hall, Glasgow, on 19 April 2024, and drew over a hundred conference delegates from all over the world, including scholars, museum professionals, practising lawyers and community representatives. Now the conference organisers, CREATe, the IAL and The Hunterian, are proud to unveil the CREATe Online Resource for the From Scotland to the World: Repatriation and Museums event, which includes recordings of conference presentations and an expanded report.
From Scotland to the World involved ten months of inter-institutional discussion and planning, involving the close collaboration of CREATe, The Hunterian and the IAL. The Repatriation and Museums conference was originally conceived as a small-scale add-on event to the original aim: inviting the IAL to Glasgow to celebrate the collaboration of the three institutions on a Special Issue of Art, Antiquity and Law about galleries and donor restrictions (which took place in The Hunterian Art Gallery on 18th April 2024); if the IAL was to come to Glasgow, might we run an event about art and law together the next day?
It was clear, early in the three-way inter-institutional discussions, that repatriation of artefacts by museums to countries and communities of origin would be a fitting topic for a Glasgow event. Repatriation speaks to the present moment: as instances of repatriation grow, a topical question is how to formalise guidance that supports museum best practice. Further, repatriation is a subject with clear links to Glasgow: Glasgow Museums long led the way in the UK in setting museum best practice on repatriation (in the guidance which it developed following its repatriation of the Ghost Dance Shirt to the Lakota people in the 1990s). Hence, our conference title was From Scotland to the World: starting with progressive museums’ best practice in Scotland, we would then look outwards to the world through a series of geographical panels, involving direct conversations between collaborating UK institutions and representatives of claimants located in North America, Australia and the Caribbean.
Looking back, it is clear that the resulting conference vastly exceeded many of the early expectations of the conference organising committee (Elena Cooper and Andreas Giorgallis from CREATe, Alexander Herman of the IAL, and Steph Scholten of The Hunterian). For instance, we assumed that we would run on a hybrid basis, so overseas speakers could join on-line. Yet, in fact, on the day, all presentations were delivered in person in Kelvin Hall (with our Australian speakers making it to Glasgow on time, despite Dubai floods delaying their transit stop-over). Further, the content of the conference – the presentations themselves – extended and went beyond the early conceptions of the From Scotland to the World theme.
First, in January 2024, as we prepared to advertise the conference, there was an important new development in Scotland: the Scottish Government formally accepted the recommendations of the Empire, Slavery and Scotland’s Museums project (or ‘ESSM’, which involved the three speakers that opened and closed our conference: Steph Scholten, Duncan Dornan and Neil Curtis). Recommendation 6 states that the Scottish Government ‘should demonstrate their support for the restitution and repatriation of looted or unethically acquired items in Scottish collections.’ As we learnt at the conference, the pro-repatriation stance of the Scottish Government is material to enabling return by Scottish museums. Under the National Heritage (Scotland) Act 1985, the National Museum of Scotland can dispose of objects if approved by the Secretary of State and, following Scottish devolution, the relevant minister is in Scotland. Even where no such formal consent is required, the Scottish Government’s position matters. As Duncan Dornan expressed at the conference, on behalf of Glasgow Museums (a local authority museum that has no express legal restrictions on disposing objects in its collections), the fact that Glasgow Council has always had both the support of the Scottish Government and the mood of its electorate, really mattered: ‘It would be very hard… to make [repatriation] happen where there is a will to stop it.’ Accordingly, the formal commitment of the Scottish Government, in January 2024, reinforced the importance of a Scottish perspective on repatriation practice.
Secondly, it was clear that the conference pushed the boundaries of the theme From Scotland to the World in another sense. As Georgina Young of Manchester Museum remarked – in telling the story of the repatriation by Manchester Museum of artefacts to the Aboriginal Anindilyakwa community of Groote Eylandt, Australia – ‘Manchester is not in Scotland’. Young, pictured right, had been in Glasgow for the return of by Glasgow Museums of the Lakota Ghost Dance Shirt in the 1990s and described this as a formative experience. Yet, she presented Manchester Museum’s returns to the Anindilyakwa people as Mancunian in spirit: ‘Manchester has… pride in its radical history’ and repatriation is a ‘form of radicalism’: ‘it’s a quiet radicalism that is not about us.’ Therefore, while we might think of the British Museum – which is legally obliged (under the British Museum Act 1963), to ‘keep’ objects and not dispose of them (with only very narrow exceptions) – as personifying the approach to repatriation in England, the conference highlighted that the regional English position can be rather different.
Thirdly, more than just a conference, From Scotland to the World coincided with an actual return: the return by The Hunterian (part of the University of Glasgow) of a natural history specimen of the Jamaican giant galliwasp, a lizard endemic to the island, a process which involved six of the speakers: Shani Roper of the University of West Indies, Elizabeth Morrison of the Institute of Jamaica, Mike Rutherford, Giovanna Vitelli, and Steph Scholten of The Hunterian, and Churnjeet Mahn of University of Strathclyde (the first three, pictured left). The return of the Galliwasp itself pushed the boundaries of how we conceive of repatriation. Repatriating a natural history specimen, in going beyond established categories such as sacred objects and human remains, made clear that the scope of repatriation should also include, as Vitelli expressed, “aspects of the natural world that also carry meaning.” Scholten described the repatriation of the Galliwasp as opening up “the whole box of Pandora”: “It means that everything in museums can be viewed through a colonial lens and it means everything should be considered [for repatriation] if and when that would be appropriate.”
Further, the conference highlighted numerous instances in which states play an important role in facilitating repatriation, whether in the stance of the Scottish Government (noted above), the activities of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Islander Studies (an Australian Government agency that enables returns to Aboriginal communities), or the role of the Canadian military in physically transporting the Ni’isjoohl Totem Poleby military jet from Edinburgh to the Nisga’a people, Nass Valley (in today’s British Columbia Canada). Yet, states played no role in the return of the Galliwasp. Rather, the return of the Galliwasp well illustrates the potential for interested parties – claimant communities and museums – to bypass states altogether, by developing what Shani Roper referred to as an ‘institution-to-institution’ approach. The return of the Galliwasp by The Hunterian was possible under the terms of the Memorandum of Understanding between the University of Glasgow and the University of the West Indies signed in 2019, committing the two institutions to further reparative justice. And, fitting for a conference co-hosted by a University, the MOU was rooted in the work of scholars in shifting the boundaries of knowledge: the publication of ‘Slavery, Abolition and the University of Glasgow’ in 2018 by historians Simon Newman and Stephen Mullen, which explores the University’s links to the slave trade.
Finally, the conference highlighted that repatriation does not stop with return of the physical cultural object. The presentations by two leading scholars on intellectual property repatriation – CREATe Fellows Pinar Oruç (University of Manchester) and Andrea Wallace (University of Exeter) – unravelled the importance of also facilitating ‘return’ of rights in copies of repatriated artefacts or recordings of oral heritage. As Wallace explained: “Intellectual property restitution means everything that is created, that is a derivative of the act of dispossession … should go back to the community of origin.” And, important to a conference that was funded and organised by an academic research centre – CREATe – that is part of University of Glasgow’s School of Law – intellectual property restitution highlights the continuing relevance of law to repatriation. As Martin Kretschmer, CREATe Director, stated in the discussion following the closing panel: “For the material object, it really is not a legal question – you need to have a process and a conversation. Restitution or repatriation will work under the right conditions of trust; but from the intellectual property perspective, it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work at all; the process will not end by handing over the object. Something more needs to be formalised, an intervention that deserves much further thought.”
The CREATe Online Resource for the From Scotland to the World: Repatriation and Museums Conference co-convened by CREATe, the IAL and The Hunterian, includes recordings of conference presentations, a full event report and programme. For updates from CREATe, please sign-up to our newsletter.
Members of CREATe conference team (from left to right): Andreas Giorgallis, Elena Cooper and CREATe LLM students Sonny Joe McPherson, Colm O’Sullivan, Lucy Cunningham, and Kavya Ramapuram Balaji. Missing from the photo: LLM student Anand Krishna, CREATe tech intern and PhD student Weiwei Yi, and Administration Lead Diane McGrattan.
Photographs by Lukas Powroziewicz