‘Time is of the essence’: Indigenous group looks to repatriate sacred items from Switzerland

Indigenous artifacts and cultural items from communities in Canada and the United States on display at a private museum in Switzerland (Coleen Rajotte/Bringing Them Home)

Indigenous advocates are calling for immediate help to repatriate a significant collection of artifacts from a private collection in Switzerland.

The items, which include ceremonial items, beaded regalia and historical weapons, are just some of the thousands of Indigenous artifacts that have been housed at a privately owned museum near Zurich.

The museum has since closed its doors, and advocates are trying to get their hands on these sacred items before they are sold off.

“Right now, time is of the essence,” said Indigenous advocate Coleen Rajotte. “They are all sitting in boxes in Switzerland right now, so there’s a real urgency about this, that we are able to raise this money and return these items back to our people.”

Rajotte and other members of the Bringing Them Home project, which is the advocacy group behind this repatriation effort, are seeking $20 million to help buy the artifacts and bring them back to Canada.

Rajotte says the owner of the museum is retiring and wants to sell the collection for around $17 million, but she says they plan to hire an appraiser to visit the collection in Switzerland to evaluate the items.

“We need to figure out if this price, that he’s asking of anywhere from $13 to $17 million, is that a fair price? We have no idea. So, we would need to find and hire people to go and look at each and every one of these items,” she said.

Rajotte says this process needs to happen sooner rather than later, to avoid losing the items to other bidders.

“They could end up in Dubai, or in New York, or elsewhere in some billionaire’s office under glass as a showpiece,” she said. “That would be utterly wrong.”

Karl Stone and Gerald Neufeld, who are members of the Bringing Them Home project, travelled to Switzerland last year to see the collection first-hand.

Stone says he believes many of the items are from the Dakota, Ojibwe and Cree nations in Manitoba.

“When I was there in Switzerland, I felt the energy of our ancestors; I felt the power of our people in those sacred items,” said Stone, who is a councillor for Dakota Tipi First Nation, in western Manitoba.

“They’re not things, just things you display like trophies; they’re not. They are sacred and they are holy to our people, and they need to be looked after with prayer. We ask all governments, we ask all museums and all the citizens to please work with us in bringing home these sacred objects and sacred items.”

Neufeld says the effort to bring the artifacts home is about more than preserving history.

“This is a very important part of the whole healing process for our Indigenous people who live in this land, and the time is here that we need to be putting efforts into bringing these home,” he said.

If the repatriation effort succeeds, Rajotte says organizers would consider establishing a museum in Winnipeg to house the collection. But for now, the focus remains on securing the artifacts before they disappear into private hands.

In the meantime, the collection has been placed into storage while discussions about its future continue.

Historian Sean Carelton says repatriation is an act of sovereignty, saying Indigenous nations should be given the ability to reclaim sacred items that were taken without permission.

“There was a longstanding colonial practice of collecting, often stealing, and then selling cultural items from Indigenous and colonized peoples around the world and selling them to private collectors or museums to display,” said Carleton, who is an Indigenous studies professor at the University of Manitoba. “This was one way in which colonial power was performed and put on display. The process of repatriation, then, is also one of decolonization, of building better relations.”