Facts, Method, and Basic Concepts

Abstract

The cultural property repatriation claims of indigenous peoples are a reversing consequence of an almost exclusive one-way flow of indigenous cultural property into western civilisations. It is an open secret that western museums and public or private collections display and store the majority of indigenous cultural property. The collections comprise hundreds of thousands of objects, featuring past and present native, tribal, or ‘primitive’ cultures. The National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) of the American Smithsonian Institution alone houses more than one million objects and artefacts and vast photographic, media, and paper archives relating to the archaeology, ethnology, and history of Native American peoples. On the other side, innumerable indigenous communities are isolated from their cultural items.