Native South Americans have been asked by the British Museum to study artefacts collected during the colonial era, some of which were seized by Captain Cook’s expedition team in the 18th century.
More than 150 years ago, colonialist adventurers plundering from Tierra del Fuego at the edge of the Americas stole the artefacts.
Though the British Museums said that repatriation is not the aim of the visit, the tourists now intend to bring them back to their country of origin.
Representatives from the settlements of Yahgan and Kawésqar Atap, who are from the point of the Americas, travelled to London to examine the artefacts for the first time.
The first Yahgan-to-English dictionary, test tubes used to store native paint, and a boat used by the nomadic people to sail to several islands for sustenance are among them.
The Horniman Museum’s decision to repatriate 72 artefacts to Nigeria has put pressure on the British Museum to do the same.
The ability to repatriate goods and human remains is guaranteed to indigenous tribes under Chile’s new constitution, which its inhabitants will vote on next week.
Claudia González Vidal, a Yahgan artisan, was able to compare some of her own handmade baskets with those of her relatives’ that had been in British hands for 150 years thanks to the insepction.
The group was headed by Alberto Serrano Fillol, director of the Tierra del Fuego region of Chile’s Martin Gusinde Anthropological Museum.
“The question of repatriation or reparation is always present,” he said.
Everybody would want the items in every museum in Europe or anywhere else to be repatriated, particularly the significant items.
And recently, this has become a hot topic.
But we are aware that it is not that easy. To enable access to the communities and people of Tierra del Fuego, we first want to start working with the British Museum to investigate alternatives.
The artefacts and collections are magnificent, but there are more of them than many European museums believe.
It is an unique inheritance, that of the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego.
Captain Cook’s Expeditions
A large portion of the northwestern American continent’s shoreline was mapped by Cook.
He did so while travelling on board the HMS Endeavour, a British research ship that arrived in Botany Bay in 1770 and was the first ship to visit Australia’s east coast.
Cook, a Scottish farm laborer’s son, was born in Marton, Yorkshire, now a neighbourhood of Middlesbrough, on October 27, 1728.
The Seven Years War with France and Spain was a fantastic opportunity for the explorer to apply his mapping abilities.
Additionally, he sailed through both the North and South Islands of New Zealand and created the first comprehensive map of the nation’s coastline.
Conditions were terrible as he started out for the Americas, with blinding blizzards, freezing fogs, and possibly lethal ice floes.
Cook’s terrible stomach issues caused him to become more irritable than normal.
After meeting the Hawaiian ruler Kalaniopuu, his expeditions came to an end.
After an argument, one of the Hawaiian chiefs brought out a dagger and stabbed Cook, ending his illustrious adventures.
Therefore, it was crucial that they could attend, including the researchers as well as the great-grandchildren and great-great grandchildren of the individuals who created the things housed there.
The British Museum has a number of interesting items, including animal fiber-knitted shell necklaces, fishing gear, arrowheads, spoons formed of muscle, and test tubes filled with pigments used by native people to decorate themselves.
A full-size boat that the Anglican missionary Waite Stirling brought with him in the middle of the 19th century is also present—an object that no longer exists in Chile proper.
In addition to reuniting with long-lost relics of their own culture, Mr. Serrano Fillol said that the Yahgans and Kawésqar Atap may assist the museum in developing a more thorough understanding of their history and significance.
“In the end, they don’t have all the information on these items and collections that we gave,” he said.
The inspiration for this endeavour to study and learn came from it since you can’t even find these items in Patagonia, the author writes.
The Yahgan novelist Cristina Zárraga Riquelme had the opportunity to examine the original manuscript of a Yahgan-English dictionary created by the missionary and linguist Thomas Bridges during the delegation’s visits to the British Library and the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University.
He was an Anglican and the first white person to learn Yahgan, according to Mr. Serrano Fillol. He created a published Yahgan-English dictionary.
But the British Library has the original document. We went with a Yahgan lady who is committed to preserving the language, and we saw the movie together. She was never given the opportunity to view it.
Since early British immigrants were the first Europeans to colonise the area, many items from Tierra del Fuego are now in London.
Some also originated from explorers like Captain Cook and Robert Fitzroy, the latter of whom steered the HMS Beagle on her illustrious journey with Charles Darwin.
The British Museum is under pressure to restore the Elgin Marbles that were robbed from the Parthenon in Athens in the 19th century, while the Horniman Museum has agreed to return 72 items to Nigeria that were stolen from Benin City during a military assault in 1897.
The current visit, according to Laura Osorio Sunnucks, a researcher at the Santo Domingo Centre of Excellence for Latin American Research of the British Museum, was not intended to start a process of repatriation but rather to strengthen ties between the museum, its collections, and the communities from which they originated.
We contacted Alberto because of all the wonderful work he does with communities in Chile, she said.
It involves determining their needs and wants and considering a project that will have a significant effect.
“Some demands for repatriation focus on colonial control, the museum and its ownership, and the story around those things. However, what we are attempting to do is develop a project that looks beyond the collections and the items themselves and examines modern connections.
We want to make sure that any initiatives we finance and support are ultimately more important to the neighbourhood than they are to the museum.
The Martin Gusinde Museum in Chile works to return items to indigenous communities in Chile as part of its mission.
Since a new, progressive government has been elected, Mr. Serrano Fillol expressed his hope that things will get simpler.
It has drafted a new constitution that will grant indigenous communities the right to repatriate items and human remains if it is approved by voters in September.
The museum director said, “I certainly hope so, but the cultural and museum sector have been severely damaged in Chile as a result of the epidemic.
“There were significant cutbacks.” Our budget was reduced by half, making it the most negatively impacted sector in the whole nation.
But for us to be able to develop this work, it’s crucial. It’s crucial to preserve this history.
The artefacts of these ancient people are often not given that much worth or significance; they are sometimes seen as incidental, yet they are very fascinating.