In April 2024, the primary repatriation of a pure historical past specimen to the English-speaking Caribbean occurred between the College of the West Indies in Jamaica and the College of Glasgow in Scotland beneath a memorandum of understanding. The specimen, an extinct Jamaican big galliwasp, a reptile which the workforce named Celeste, was final documented as seen within the 1840s. The specimen is now within the nationwide natural world assortment of the Pure Historical past Museum of Jamaica.
Repatriation responds to European colonialism and enlargement. Within the Caribbean, colonisation resulted within the systematic depopulating of Indigenous peoples, the pressured importation of Africans, and the arrival of Indians and Chinese language beneath indentureship schemes.
Imperial enlargement additionally relied on cultural extraction and theft. In Jamaica, cultural objects had been taken throughout Spanish (1492-1655) and British rule (1655-1962) and labeled as patrimony of empire. Their elimination within the identify of empire represents looting, and their repatriation establishes a restitutive course of to reclaim materials cultural id.
Repairing the harm
The repatriation of cultural objects, together with artwork, is an especially advanced one formed by authorized, nationwide and worldwide insurance policies. Repatriation capabilities as half of a bigger restitutive course of that seeks to restore harm resulting from world histories of looting and the destruction of cultural property.
Unesco’s 1954 Hague Conference was the primary worldwide try to guard cultural property throughout wartime. The 1970 and 1995 UniDroit conventions on illicit trafficking of cultural property search to encourage international locations to develop the infrastructure to doc and defend cultural heritage from illicit appropriation. Whereas that is solely a pattern of the conventions defending of cultural property, they don’t handle illicit trafficking previous to 1970.
The Intergovernmental Committee on Restitution and Repatriation is a vital discussion board for international locations to formally request the repatriation of cultural objects, particularly these looted throughout colonialism, however nationwide legislative frameworks just like the British Museum Act of 1963 usually undermine the repatriation course of.
Beat the blockers
Universities can present an essential avenue for repatriation in instances the place nationwide insurance policies and legal guidelines undermine worldwide conventions and bilateral agreements. The return of Jamaica’s extinct galliwasp offers stakeholders entry to a moist specimen for examine and has stimulated analysis on repatriation and colonial accumulating inside reparative justice debates within the Caribbean.
The reclamation of id and heritage as restitution has guided many repatriation processes together with Jewish cultural materials looted by Nazis, the Benin Bronzes, and the return of human stays to Namibia from Germany, and of ceremonial army items to Sri Lanka from the Netherlands.
Reclamation of id is the premise of the Jamaican authorities’s continued requests for the return of the Carpenter’s Mountain Zemi assortment pilfered by Isaac Alves Rebello in 1792 and bought by the British Museum between 1799 and 1803. The three carvings are the perfect and largest examples of pre-Columbian Indigenous artwork from Jamaica. Resistance to returning the gathering denies the typical Jamaican entry to the range of Caribbean artwork courting way back to the Taíno, Jamaica’s Indigenous inhabitants—cultural property collections housed in North America and Europe require visas to go to.
Redefining cultural property
Celeste’s return gives Caribbean practitioners a possibility to rethink definitions of cultural property. If we outline Caribbean cultural materials as any bodily manipulation, corresponding to portray or shaping, of any materials (clay, steel, textiles, wooden, and so on) for societal use courting from early proof of human occupation to the current and originating particularly from the archipelagic and coastal areas bounded by the Caribbean Sea, then we exclude natural world. Utilizing a extra expansive definition of cultural materials to incorporate nature, we should acknowledge that our collections might be anyplace.
Repatriation is a mandatory moral apply that dismantles historic inequity in each entry to materials tradition and development of cultural data and id. It’s a vital a part of restorative and reparatory justice.
Shani Roper is the curator of the College of the West Indies Museum and a member of the five-person workforce that returned Celeste to Jamaica from the College of Glasgow, Scotland in April 2024
