From Scotland to the World: Repatriation and Museums

The conference was opened by Martin Kretschmer (Professor of Intellectual Property Law and Director of CREATe) and Rachel Sandison (Deputy Vice Chancellor, External Engagement and Vice Principal, University of Glasgow).

Martin Kretschmer expressed that the conference has “at its heart” an “interdisciplinary perspective” and Rachel Sandison welcomed the audience ”to world changing Glasgow”, noting the wider context for this event: the University of Glasgow’s commitment to reparative justice following the publication of ‘Slavery, Abolition and the University of Glasgow’ in 2018 (by historians Simon Newman and Stephen Mullen).

Emiline Smith (Lecturer in Criminology, University of Glasgow) moderated a panel of Scottish repatriation experts.

Steph Scholten (Director, The Hunterian, Glasgow) opened with a quotation from George Orwell’s novel ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

Scholten commented: “Orwell’s quote is particularly relevant to our topic today: historical items can be extremely powerful representations of past inequalities and past histories and repatriation can be a powerful tool to redress those inequalities and empower people in the present for the benefit of the future.”

Duncan Dornan (Head of Museums and Collections, Glasgow Life) explained a “shift in focus”  in the 1990s, within Glasgow Museums, away from the position that “museums have a collective responsibility… to preserve the past”, to the following: “If museums represent our better selves, our humane values, then we have to admit the possibility that there may be other values which are more important than possession and preservation. Possession in itself cannot be an absolute value taking precedence over all others.”

Dornan also commented: “It is really important in dealing with repatriation to avoid generalisation. It is really dangerous to assume that there is a standard approach to repatriation which you can mindlessly apply to every situation. If you take a standardised approach, it is as colonialist perhaps as the removal of the object in the first place and we need to take on board people’s opinions and respect their views and aspirations if we are to deal with this in the right way.”

Neil Curtis (Head of Museums and Special Collections, University of Aberdeen) explained: “This is about people – I want us to hold onto that throughout today – and we are talking about some of the most dreadful things people have done to other people. We are talking about power that some people have over other people, and I note three white men sitting here and having power. There are real issues in this that we need to address, and that brings with it obligations and opportunities to use that privilege and to use that power … Those of us on the platform have an obligation to let other voices to be heard.”

This panel concerned the role of AIATSIS, an Australian Government agency, in facilitating returns to Aboriginal communities, focussing on returns by Manchester Museum to the Anindilyakwa people.

Jason Lyons (Director, Return of Cultural Heritage, AIATSIS) explained: “Aboriginal and Torres Islander people have been seeking the return of their cultural heritage material from the day it was taken and so this is nothing new. It was really interesting to hear Neil [Curtis, Head of Museums, University of Aberdeen] and Steph [Scholten of The Hunterian] acknowledge that [in Panel 1 of this conference]. This cultural heritage material is our treasures: these are our crown jewels.”

Georgina Young (Head of Exhibitions and Collections, Manchester Museum) commented: “What [Manchester Museum] is building is a case about is where cultural heritage is going to have most meaning: where it is going to make most difference, where it is going to be most alive and most at home. Because that is what museums are for fundamentally, not just about keeping things just because you have the legal right to them.”

Iain Johnston (Senior Researcher, AIATSIS) noted: “What was key [in facilitating returns from Manchester Museum] was having conversations in the spaces where Anindilyakwa people make decisions. And that is a fundamental tenet of our work. It is about custodians: people with the cultural authority to make decisions about material, and those custodians making decisions where they would typically want to make a decision.”

Emily Gould (Assistant Director, Institute of Art and Law) moderated a panel of legal experts.

Alexander Herman (Director, Institute of Art and Law) spoke about national law and commented: “You can’t have too many rules in place; you can’t try to dictate outcomes solely through the law; while the law should certainly be there to create a space for communities working with collections and directors and managers, so they can be empowered, the law also needs to take a step back to allow those decisions to be made in a more ethical space.”

Andreas Giorgallis (PhD Student, CREATe) presented on public international law and noted: “The divide between the ‘civilised us’ and the ‘uncivilised other’ continues to survive in contemporary corridors of international cultural heritage law. This is largely because of the principle of inter-temporal law: we need to assess the legality of the taking against the contemporary standards of the time. So, in the case of eleven Ethiopian Tabots [in the collection of the British Museum] we need to look at the standards of the time in 1868. You can see how the principle of inter-temporal law invites racial and structural bias.”

Christa Roodt (Senior Lecturer, History of Art, University of Glasgow) spoke about private international law: “Disagreements arise in legal circles over the issue of ownership and belonging of cultural property and heritage that can’t be settled to everyone’s satisfaction. These disagreements are not just about legal norms, but they are also about semantics, semiotics, conceptualisations – the conceptual…. In private international law, one of the main problems is that adjudicators frequently fail to identify objects as sacred cultural heritage. They simply have a blind spot and miss that classification or identification in its entirety.”

Elena Cooper (Senior Research Fellow, CREATe) moderated a panel which spanned two distinct issues: first, what happens to the cultural object after it is returned, and secondly, what is the status of intellectual property rights in images/records of the returned material?

Kristin Hausler (Dorset Senior Research Fellow in Public International Law and Director, Centre for International Law, British Institute of International and Comparative Law) commented: “What we have found in our seven case studies [of the story of objects after repatriation] is that the reintegration of the returned object is very challenging and is never straightforward. There is not necessarily one view [whether within government, museum or communities] of what should be done with an object.”

Pinar Oruç (CREATe Fellow and Lecturer in Commercial law, University of Manchester) explained: “Cultural property law and copyright law are two separate areas. They are incompatible in the first place… There are three clashes. One is the theory: the public interest in access to heritage doesn’t override the interests of the author… There is a legal clash… and there are also practical clashes.”

Andrea Wallace (CREATe Fellow and Associate Professor, University of Exeter) asked: “Why is intellectual property not also cultural property? How do we not view the claim of copyright – new intellectual property that gets imposed on the digital surrogates – as also being a contemporary taking, a new form of colonial claim that comes actually from the history of copyright. The invention of copyright, expanding it through colonisation, imperial conquest, bilateral and multilateral treaties, to the system we have today where to engage in world trade you have to align your national copyright laws to a specific standard. 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.”

In the Q&A, Shani Roper (Museum Curator, Museum of the University of the West Indies) commented: ”A lot of the audio-visual collections from the Caribbean were held by British institutions prior to independence… [We are now required] to pay in pounds for content developed in the Caribbean. I am very happy with these presentations because these are the things that we are up in arms about.”

Giovanna Vitelli (Head of Collections & Curatorial, The Hunterian) introduced a panel about the return by The Hunterian, Glasgow, of a natural history specimen – the Jamaican giant galliwasp (a lizard endemic to the island) – to the Institute of Jamaica, which took place a few days after the conference.

As Vitelli stated: “The extraction of scientific knowledge and material is part of the broader flow of resources from former colonies to Britain. … [Yet] until recently, the focus has been on the repatriation of cultural items and cultural ancestral items. My concern is that natural history specimens have been siloed. What we are trying to do in our work is to build methodological and conceptual bridges. We see this as having potential for healing and reinforcing identity. What we will hear today with the Galliwasp story, is how to enrich this dialogue…  to include aspects of the natural world that also carry meaning.”

Churnjeet Mahn (Deputy Associate Principal, Professor of English, University of Strathclyde) described the moment that she spotted the Galliwasp, as a community curator working on the ‘Curating Discomfort’ exhibition at The Hunterian, as well as the mission of that exhibition, to develop “an anti-racist pedagogical approach to museums”: “As community curators, part of what we wanted to do is to curate difficult questions about the legacy of slavery in empowering colonialism for all the communities who held a stake in those systems and all the communities who found their lives and livelihoods at stake in those systems.”

Mike Rutherford (Curator of Zoology and Anatomy, The Hunterian) commented: “The specimen that we repatriated is ‘the largest known species – the Jamaican Giant Galliwasp. I thought it was the perfect candidate for repatriation: it is endemic – it is only found in Jamaica – and it is extinct as far as we know; and it is natural heritage icon: it is a key part of the biodiversity of the Island. There are also no museum specimens in Jamaica. I talked to Giovanna [Vitelli, Head of Collections & Curatorial, The Hunterian] and I talked to Steph [Scholten, Director, The Hunterian]: can I start a communication about repatriating this? And it was a very simple idea: would you like us to send you the Galliwasp?… What this is all leading to is the circular exchange of knowledge and collaboration and work ongoing between the University of the West Indies, The Institute of Jamaica and ourselves.”

Shani Roper (Museum Curator, Museum of the University of the West Indies) explained: “Mike [Rutherford, Curator of Zoology and Anatomy, The Hunterian] emailing me was very important to us. It would never occur to me to ask [The Hunterian in] Glasgow if they had a Galliwasp specimen. Ethics and transparency… are very very important. It is time for us to expand how we think about repatriation: how do we do the institution-to-institution approach.” Shani Roper also noted: “This is the first repatriation of a natural history specimen in the English [speaking] Caribbean and it may actually expand to the entire region… The Memorandum of Understanding between the University of West Indies and the University of Glasgow allows us to think about another way of doing things that has nothing to do with national politics or the infrastructural developments that have to happen at a national level to facilitate it.”

Elizabeth Morrison (Zoologist, Natural History Museum of Jamaica, Institute of Jamaica) noted: “Some press releases have gone out about the lizard repatriation and our phones are blowing up! People are excited: when can they see the lizard specimen? We want to show Jamaica in a positive light in terms of its biodiversity. We also need to spur interest in students to study biology … We feel very strongly that it will spur conservation efforts for some of our other reptiles that are endangered and facing extinction in the same way as the Galliwasp.”

Geoffrey Bennett (Senior Fellow, Institute of Art and Law) moderated presentations about the return by the Ni’isjoohl Totem Pole by National Museums of Scotland to the Nisga’a people, Nass Valley (today in British Columbia Canada), by John Giblin (Keeper, Department of Global Arts, Culture and Design, National Museums of Scotland) and Chanté St Clair Inglis (Director of Heritage and Estates, Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh; formerly Head of Collections Services, National Museums of Scotland).  Amy Parent (Associate Professor, Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University, Canada) was also a confirmed speaker, but was unable to attend due to unforeseen circumstances.

Emiline Smith (Lecturer in Criminology, University of Glasgow) reflected on the learning from the conference in discussion with the three Scottish repatriation experts from the first panel: Neil Curtis (Head of Museums and Special Collections, University of Aberdeen), Duncan Dornan (Head of Museums and Collections, Glasgow Life) and Steph Scholten (Director, The Hunterian).

Steph Scholten explained that: “The big change lies in a shift in power and authority… so to allow open conversations about where things may be best placed to have the most meaning… The one thing that I love about [repatriating] the Galliwasp, is that having a natural history specimen repatriated opens 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, if and when that would be appropriate.”

Duncan Dornan commented that: “As a local authority museum… what has made things easier for us is that the politics of this in Scotland are very positive just now: [Glasgow] Council has [the Scottish] Government behind it and that is driven by the mood of the population. In the 1990s [the time of Glasgow Museums’ first repatriation] the population of Glasgow was in favour of repatriation; if that were not the case, would that have been difficult? Yes, I think it would have been. It is very hard to put rules in place to make it happen where there is a will to stop it and I think you can see that happening in other parts of the UK. We are in a good place, but that can easily change.”

And in the Q&A, Martin Kretschmer (Professor of Intellectual Property Law and Director of CREATe) noted: “I started my welcome today by saying that the topic of discussion was really not a legal question… but as an IP lawyer, coming out of today, I have doubts again. 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.”

In this Event Report, CREATe’s Dr Elena Cooper explains the development of the ‘From Scotland to the World: Repatriation and Museums’ conference in collaboration with The Hunterian and the Institute of Art and Law and reflects on the event itself and its significance.

From Scotland to the World: Repatriation and Museums was a major international conference which took place in Kelvin Hall on Friday 19^th April, funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council grant awarded to CREATe (GBP 1 million, 2024-2028). Over 20 speakers from all over the globe – including leading professionals, scholars and practitioners in the fields of museums, heritage and repatriation – addressed a packed-out auditorium, comprising over 100 delegates, on diverse issues relating to the return of artefacts held by museums to communities of origin.

From Inter-Institutional Discussion to International Conference

From Scotland to the World involved ten months of inter-institutional discussion and planning, involving the close collaboration between CREATe, The Hunterian and the Institute of Art and Law (‘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 18^thApril 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.

The Conference itself: Navigating Past, Present and Future

In opening the first panel, Steph Scholten of The Hunterian quoted from George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four: ‘Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past’. Scholten spoke of the ‘relevance of that quote today’: ‘historical items can be extremely powerful representations of past inequalities and past histories’ and ‘repatriation can be a powerful tool to address those inequalities and empower people in the present for the benefit of the future.’ And that capacity for repatriation to empower people, as we heard in a number of presentations, is part of a far broader societal project: of decolonising knowledge, of critically reflecting on how we tell our histories, and of uncovering new historical narratives that break with, rather than reinforce, past inequalities of power.

The disjunction of the values of the past and those many wish to pursue today, pervaded much of the conference. One unspoken fact was that the conference venue – Kelvin Hall – was built on the site of a very different event in 1901: the Glasgow International Exhibition, which, in the spirit of Victorian international exhibitions (starting with the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace in 1851) was an uncritical celebration of imperial power. The debate in Kelvin Hall at From Scotland to the World conference in April 2024, could not be more different.

That contrast in values, between past and present, was captured in a powerful visual moment at the 2024 conference. Those speaking for museum practice at the National Museums of Scotland – John Giblin and Chanté St Clair Inglis – first noted the Victorian architecture of the main hall, National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, which intentionally emulates Crystal Palace and calls to mind the 1851 Great Exhibition’s celebration of imperial values. The audience was shown black and white photographs from the 1930s, of a huge exhibit that appears a permanent fixture in a Victorian exhibition space: the Ni’isjoohl Totem Pole (11 metres tall and weighing 1 tonne), which had been sold to the Museum in the early twentieth century, having been taken without consent from the Nisga’a people, Nass Valley (today in British Columbia, Canada). Yet, in a couple of minutes of high-speed video footage, Giblin and Inglis showed the Pole being packed up and removed from the Museum and returned by Canadian military jet to the Nisga’a people. We should and can, the message seemed to be, make different choices today.

Repatriation through a Legal Lens

But can we make different choices? This was an important point, given the conference was paid for and organised by an academic research centre – CREATe – that is part of University of Glasgow’s School of Law. Throughout the conference we heard of instances of the law standing in the way of return and supporting a value-system of the past: the value in museums preserving objects without regard to where they would have most meaning to people. The British Museum Act 1963, as we learnt from Alexander Herman (IAL Director), obliges the British Museum to ‘keep’ objects and not to dispose of them, save for limited statutory exceptions (duplicates, artefacts unfit for keeping, and following specific statutory amendments in 2004 and 2009 respectively: human remains and Nazi looted art) and in France, museum collections are inalienable (both under heritage code and as public property) with exceptions requiring special legislation, or the agreement of a long-term loan. Also, Andreas Giorgallis (PhD student, CREATe) explained how basic public international law principles of inter-temporal law (i.e. that legality is judged by the standards of the time, not those of today) and non-retroactivity (i.e. that new laws only apply to the future, not the past), in this context, enable international law frameworks to sustain past values: the ‘civilised us’ against the ‘uncivilised other’.

Interestingly, those museums that have chosen to return artefacts, have legal frameworks that are flexible to accommodate new values. Glasgow Museums, which has long taken a progressive approach to return, is run by Glasgow City Council; as a local Council, it has a wide discretion in its actions and crucially, as Duncan Dornan explained, repatriation has long been supported by its electorate: the population of Glasgow. National Museums of Scotland, while subject to legislation (the National Heritage (Scotland) Act 1985) broadly similar to the British Museum Act 1963, nevertheless can dispose of objects if approved by the Secretary of State and, importantly, following Scottish devolution, the relevant minister is in Scotland (not Westminster).

So, legal frameworks, right now, do impact directly on the space in which institutional decisions are made. But what should the role for law be in this area? Many voiced the view that this is an area for deregulation: the law and lawyers should ‘step back’, argued Alexander Herman, to let conversations happen between museums and communities in an ‘ethical space’, though always guided by internal museum procedures. Interestingly, in that ‘ethical space’, legal hierarchies relating to the binding status of legal sources are completely inverted: the ICOM Code of Ethics, that guides the ‘ethical space’ of museum practice, refers not to the rules relating to treaties – binding instruments of international law (referred to by Giorgallis – see above) – but rather to the principles enshrined in a non-binding international law instrument: the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. And in an emotionally powerful speech, Georgina Young of Manchester Museum described her commitment, not just to the articles in the Declaration on repatriation, but to ‘the whole of that document… the fundamentals of indigenous rights’.

Yet, what was also clear throughout the day, is that repatriation is not an area in which legal norms/values have been the primary driver in effecting change in museum practice. As Georgina Young continued, repatriation is about so much more ‘because we open ourselves to feel as well as to think’ and it was in conversations with communities of origin – such as the Aboriginal Anindilyakwa community of Groote Eylandt, Australia – facilitated by speakers Jason Lyons and Iain Johnston of the Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Islander Studies (an Australian government agency), that Manchester Museum developed its current approach: ‘to build a case about where cultural heritage is going to have most meaning, where it will make most difference, where it is going to be most alive and most at home.’ It was, then, collaborative conversations, made ‘in the spaces where Anindilyakwa make decisions’ (Johnston) and with ‘emotion, humility, ethics and care’ (Young), that resulted in Manchester Museum expanding its practice beyond the remit of its first return (sacred objects) to include all types of cultural object.

Repatriation as a ‘journey of discovery’

Conversations between museums and communities of origin, then, really matter. As Scholten stated, repatriation is ‘a journey of discovery’; ‘we as collection holders’ in repatriating objects, ‘often learn as much, if not more, than the people engaging with us’. And we heard about one such journey of discovery, which actually coincided with conference, 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. This 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 galliwasp return was the first ever return of a natural history specimen to the Caribbean.

Interestingly, the return of the galliwasp was not instigated by a claim from a country/community of origin; as zoologist Elizabeth Morrison explained, the Institute of Jamaica had no knowledge of The Hunterian’s holding. Rather the immediate impetus for return was the Curating Discomfort exhibition at The Hunterian, where an English Professor – Churnjeet Mahn, as guest exhibition curator – was drawn to the galliwasp specimen, ‘its body contorted, held in tension against the sides of the specimen jar’, as she made curatorial choices that, in developing an ‘anti-racist pedagogical approach’, challenged existing narratives of Empire. The story of the galliwasp, then, reveals the importance of how we create knowledge at a fundamental level and that includes knowledge created through innovative interdisciplinary dialogue.

Reflecting on ‘From Scotland to the World’

Looking back at the conference from November 2024 (the launch of this online resource), 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). ESSM 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, and that goes beyond instances where formal consent is required (e.g. the consent of the Secretary of State under the National Heritage (Scotland) Act 1985, mentioned above). 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 the support of the Scottish Government (as well as 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 – ‘Manchester is not in Scotland’. Young 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 approach of the British Museum – which is legally obliged to ‘keep’ objects and not dispose of them (with only very narrow exceptions – see above) – as personifying the approach to repatriation in England, the conference highlighted that the regional English position can be rather different.

Thirdly, as mentioned above, more than just a conference, From Scotland to the World coincided with the actual return of the Galliwasp, and that return 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 Pole by military jet from Edinburgh to the Nisga’a people in Nass Valley. 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. In thought-provoking presentations, two CREATe Fellows Pinar Oruç (University of Manchester) and Andrea Wallace (University of Exeter) unravelled the importance of also facilitating intellectual property repatriation: the ‘return’ of rights in copies of the 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 CREATe – a research centre that is part of a School of Law and includes intellectual property law within its remit – intellectual property restitution highlights the continuing relevance of law to repatriation; complex rules on ownership of intellectual property rights, for instance, mean that legislative intervention would be required to shift the balance away from rights holders (predominantly located in former imperial nations). 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.’