@RusA #9857151 Theres a strange local news that i read recently, that the Netherland goverment will send all their things in their museum, stuffs about Indonesia that they brought in their colonialism era, and i was thinking isn't that the British Museum that they were protesting about? Why the Netherland is the one who send their stuffs back to us
There's a movement now for all the old colonial powers to send back stuff they carted off from colonies when they were the local landlords. The items in the British Museum get most of the attention, but everyone was doing it back then, and some modern nations, like the Netherlands, are doing more about it than the UK. The two arguments are: on one hand, these items were stolen from those who created them and ought to be returned; on the other hand, if they're sent back, they'll just gather dust in some closet in Egypt or wherever, whereas in a major museum they can be seen and appreciated by the whole world.
Our version of that is the Repatriation movement, about how Native American artifacts that are displayed in museums ought to be returned to the tribes they were taken from. This is especially important when it comes to ritual items and skeletons, because traditional ritual practice and connection to the ancestors are major parts of Indian culture. There's certainly a good deal of justice in this movement, but unfortunately it's been muddied by what some people call "category grifters". Those are the people who insist that because they belong to some category of people who have suffered awful things, they therefore ought to be given goodies that they haven't earned. One of the worst examples of this are cases of prehistoric skeletons being claimed by various contemporary Indian tribes that can't possibly have existed when that skeleton was walking around in flesh and blood several thousand years ago.
This is a general problem with dealing with Indian tribes, because the "tribe" is a political unit created by the U.S. government in, mostly, the 1800s. The Indians themselves divided up in a variety of ways, mostly based on ancestry, language, and culture. Some of these correspond to modern tribes and some don't. Especially in cases where small neighboring bands were fused together by the Bureau of Indian Affairs into a larger tribe that they could manage more efficiently - something like what the British did in Mesopotamia after WW 1 to create the nation of Iraq - it can be difficult to determine what belongs to whom.
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@RusA #9857151
Theres a strange local news that i read recently, that the Netherland goverment will send all their things in their museum, stuffs about Indonesia that they brought in their colonialism era, and i was thinking isn't that the British Museum that they were protesting about? Why the Netherland is the one who send their stuffs back to us
There's a movement now for all the old colonial powers to send back stuff they carted off from colonies when they were the local landlords. The items in the British Museum get most of the attention, but everyone was doing it back then, and some modern nations, like the Netherlands, are doing more about it than the UK. The two arguments are: on one hand, these items were stolen from those who created them and ought to be returned; on the other hand, if they're sent back, they'll just gather dust in some closet in Egypt or wherever, whereas in a major museum they can be seen and appreciated by the whole world.
Our version of that is the Repatriation movement, about how Native American artifacts that are displayed in museums ought to be returned to the tribes they were taken from. This is especially important when it comes to ritual items and skeletons, because traditional ritual practice and connection to the ancestors are major parts of Indian culture. There's certainly a good deal of justice in this movement, but unfortunately it's been muddied by what some people call "category grifters". Those are the people who insist that because they belong to some category of people who have suffered awful things, they therefore ought to be given goodies that they haven't earned. One of the worst examples of this are cases of prehistoric skeletons being claimed by various contemporary Indian tribes that can't possibly have existed when that skeleton was walking around in flesh and blood several thousand years ago.
This is a general problem with dealing with Indian tribes, because the "tribe" is a political unit created by the U.S. government in, mostly, the 1800s. The Indians themselves divided up in a variety of ways, mostly based on ancestry, language, and culture. Some of these correspond to modern tribes and some don't. Especially in cases where small neighboring bands were fused together by the Bureau of Indian Affairs into a larger tribe that they could manage more efficiently - something like what the British did in Mesopotamia after WW 1 to create the nation of Iraq - it can be difficult to determine what belongs to whom.