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Archaeology
Reconciliation in action: SFU’s Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology advances repatriation efforts
Nestled between Saywell Hall and Renaissance Coffee is SFU’s Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology (MAE), the current home to well over 50,000 belongings from communities around the world.
Many of these belongings await their return home through a process known as repatriation, a priority for the MAE, while others continue to be cared for by museum staff including director, Barbara Hilden.
Hilden views herself less as a museum director and more as the cultural and physical caretaker for the belongings within the MAE, recognizing this hasn’t always been the stance of museums.
“Museums have deeply colonial origins. We used to run around scooping artefacts from what were erroneously seen as dying cultures. Then we put these cultural and personal belongings behind glass in our galleries,” says Hilden. “Museums don’t typically operate in this way anymore, nor have they for some time. But those painful legacies persist.”
Instead, she notes that her efforts are spent working with communities to store, display, care for and return belongings in ways that are culturally appropriate and match the individual needs and desires of communities.
She also explains that while the MAE itself does not have any Ancestors within its collection, the Department of Archaeology does care for those discovered through archaeological field work and excavations. To date, nearly 1200 Ancestors have been returned to 25 different communities, totaling approximately 70 percent of those cared for by the Department.
“Repatriation takes many shapes and means different things to different communities. At MAE, it’s always driven by the communities whose Ancestors created these belongings. They decide what we do with them,” she says. “That being said, the only plan for the remaining Ancestors still at SFU is for them to go home.”
Hilden explains that belongings are sometimes kept in the MAE at the request of communities, either because the communities themselves don’t yet have the facilities to care for and exhibit them, or so the pieces can be accessible to others to view and learn about.
Timelines for when belongings and Ancestors are returned are dictated largely by the needs, capacity and priorities of communities, and have no set pattern. Earlier this year, SDÁLṈEW̱, a sacred carved bowl was repatriated to the W̱SÁNEĆ First Nations after over thirty years at SFU, though plans for her return began prior to her even entering the museum.
Hilden attended another repatriation ceremony this summer where an Ancestor and the archaeologic site archive that had been in SFU’s care since the 1970’s were returned to the Tse’k’wa Heritage Society.
“Reconciliation, while it has very concrete meaning, can often be a bit of an abstraction. It's hard to see policy changes or the dismantling of institutional racism,” she says. “I think repatriation is one of those rare instances where you can point to a specific thing that happened. It’s tangible evidence of reconciliation.”
This work also aligns with SFU’s goal to uphold truth and reconciliation on and off campus, an integral part of What’s Next: The SFU Strategy.
As efforts continue to ensure that belongings are where they should be and the role of museums continues to evolve, Hilden is excited for the future of museums and to continue to find ways to make the MAE collaborative, interactive and intentional.