NathanY Museum Ethics

 This week I read about how Colorado Museums are doing reparation for Native American artifacts. This doesn't just mean returning the objects however. This includes respecting the tribes culture by separating certain objects and creating relationships with tribes (Simpson, 2019). After reading and realizing the impact Shelia Goff had on the History Colorado Museum, its clear to me that museums don't need to simply return the objects they contain, but also establishing relationships with the tribes that owned them. Staying with these relationships allows these tribes to educate not only the museum curators but also the public on their culture and traditions. This attitude of establishing relationships with Native American tribes has spread to other museums as well. According to Chip Colwell, the senior curator of anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, "It allows institutions to not just work mechanically, but really to try to do the right thing, to try n...

Through out history, colonialism has robbed many cultures of their heritage by stealing objects and claiming them as their own. While this has occurred for centuries, one of the most infamous examples of a culture stealing and refusing to return an object. The British Museum still holds not just an object, but the remains of the Torres are on display. (Shariatmadari, 2019) While there were talks of returning the remains to their country of origin in 2012, I could not find any information confirming the return of their dead ancestor. ( Request for Repatriation of Human Remains to the Torres Strait Islands, Australia | British Museum , n.d.) Keeping a human on display is an odd unintentional display of ethnology-science, implying the biology of humans living in the Torres are different to the rest of the world. Using the remains of an evolving human is one thing, but keeping a homo sapien there yields no scientific results.    Here's an idea of how far apart the two areas are as...