B.C. reports offer 'road map' for repatriation of Indigenous items, remains

Ashley Joannou · The Canadian Press

· Posted: Jul 01, 2025 1:39 PM EDT | Last Updated: 7 hours ago

A brace of reports retired of British Columbia are detailing the complex, costly and under-resourced process of repatriating Indigenous humanities items oregon remains backmost to their homes.

The studies, developed successful concern betwixt the First Peoples' Cultural Council and K'yuu Enterprise Corporation, telephone for changes including the instauration of a centralized assemblage to facilitate the work, a repatriation accreditation programme for museums and different institutions, and "substantial" backing and enactment from the provincial and national government.

Gretchen Fox, an anthropologist and the council's acting practice manager, said the increasing involvement successful the motivation and ethical request for repatriation shows resources are needed to acceptable retired steps that could beryllium utilized successful B.C. and successful different jurisdictions.

"There was a request for a mode forward, oregon a roadworthy representation — what's progressive successful repatriation, what's the past of it," she said.

"To person a truly bully knowing and documentation of what's been lost, wherever these ancestors and belongings are held today, and what benignant of enactment specifically is progressive successful locating them."

Researchers with the K'yuu Enterprise Corporation did a survey and recovered much than 2,500 B.C. First Nation quality remains and upwards of 100,000 belongings are known to beryllium held successful 229 institutions — including museums and universities — astir the world.

Fox said the survey had lone a 50-per-cent effect rate.

"So, we cognize that the numbers are overmuch higher, and those numbers are conscionable for ancestors and belongings that are associated with B.C. First Nations."

The main study breaks down repatriation into a four-step process starting with readying and research, followed by repatriation itself and the semipermanent caretaking of the items oregon remains.

It says 60 per cent of First Nations surveyed person already spent much than $1 cardinal connected repatriation enactment to date.

"Since the Canadian authorities has yet to perpetrate to dedicated repatriation legislation, argumentation and funding, galore [B.C. First Nations] are reliant connected grants and different mechanisms to enactment their repatriation work," it says. 

The study says erstwhile applying for assistance programs that aren't dedicated to repatriation, nations are forced to absorption connected strict backing criteria and constrictive timelines alternatively than their ain needs. 

In 2016, B.C. became the archetypal state successful Canada to connection a assistance to assistance wage for repatriation. While the study calls that backing "welcome," it says the wealth has not kept gait with requests and that repatriation successful Canada is "severely underfunded."

Fox said determination are a scope of costs, from paying unit to the exertion required to probe wherever items are located oregon the outgo to store them properly. 

A companion study offers what Fox calls a "really precocious level" outgo estimate.

It suggests that if each 204 First Nations successful the state were funded implicit 5 years to enactment successful repatriation astatine assorted stages it would outgo an estimated $663 million.

Fox said the fig is not a petition for funding, but alternatively an effort to trial the exemplary and "show the monumental, significant costs of this."

The study says repatriation is besides an economical and societal operator with benefits similar wellness and healing, jobs, and assemblage development.

"It has spiritual and taste impacts of reconnecting with belongings and carrying retired responsibilities to ancestors and It's truthful meaningful, adjacent if it's engaged astatine a slower pace, oregon connected a smaller scale," Fox said.

She said having a First Nation-led centralized organizing assemblage and programming to facilitate repatriation would beryllium adjuvant to supply the accidental to excavation acquisition and resources.

Inviting museums and different holding institutions would besides beryllium beneficial, Fox said.

In 2023, a totem rod that had been connected show astatine the Royal B.C. Museum was brought backmost to Bella Coola, located astir 1,000 kilometres northwest of Vancouver.

It was taken successful 1913 and became portion of the museum's collection.

Representatives of the Nuxalk Nation said astatine the clip that they had been trying to get the totem and different artifacts backmost since 2019.

Also successful 2023, a memorial totem rod belonging to members of the Nisga'a Nation was returned from the National Museum of Scotland successful Edinburgh, wherever it had been for astir a century.

Last year, the Heiltsuk Nation celebrated the instrumentality of a chief's spot that had been successful the Royal B.C. Museum since 1911.

Fox said an accreditation programme for institutions that clasp First Nations' remains and belongings could thatch astir repatriation and the practices and protocols needed.

She said determination is inactive enactment to beryllium done, but implicit the past fewer decades much institutions are recognizing the "moral and ethical imperative to marque things right. That these belongings and ancestors were stolen oregon taken nether duress from First Nations communities, and that the close happening to bash is to facilitate their return."

"At the aforesaid time, First Nations repatriation experts are grooming the adjacent generations wrong their communities, and they're gathering relationships with institutions. And truthful we are seeing immoderate important question and designation that this is the close happening to do."