Indigenous group look to repatriate sacred items from Swiss collector

First Nation leaders are calling for urgent action to help repatriate a significant collection of Indigenous artifacts from a private collection in Switzerland.

An Indigenous advocacy group is putting out a call for help to repatriate a large collection of Indigenous artifacts and sacred cultural belongings from Switzerland.

The Bringing Them Home project is asking governments, Indigenous leadership and organizations, museums, and other cultural institutions to help raise upwards of $20 million to purchase thousands of items that include pieces belonging to Dakota, Plains Cree, and Ojibwe communities in Manitoba.

Bringing Them Home members said the collection was previously on display at a privately-owned museum near Zurich, but the museum’s owner has retired and is looking to sell off items including sacred pipes, beaded regalia, feathered headdresses, historic firearms, and a variety of cultural belongings.

“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,” Bringing Them Home’s Coleen Rajotte told reporters in Winnipeg Tuesday.

Rajotte and her colleagues fear the collection could be split up and sold through private auctions.

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

Two Bringing Them Home members, Karl Stone and Gerald Neufeld, travelled to Switzerland as part of a delegation last year to see the collection first-hand.

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

Retired engineer Gerald Neufeld, who speaks Ojibway and grew up in Pauingassi First Nation, said items in the collection appear to be authentic.

“We need to get them authenticated, we need to get them priced, and we need to bring them home,” Neufeld said. 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, bringing these home.”

Rajotte explained the process to repatriate the collection would require hiring an appraiser to view the pieces and price out them individually.

“If this was in a government-owned museum, say in Switzerland, there’d be international laws that would protect our items, and they would have to repatriate them, but because this is a private collector, it’s an entirely different ball game,” Rajotte said.

The group noted the collection’s owner is willing to work with them.

“We contacted him yesterday to make sure that he hasn’t started the process of selling these items off one by one, and he assured us that he has not, that he wants to work with us and come up with a price and deliver it back to Canada,” Rajotte said.

The Bringing Them Home members said if the repatriation project is a success, they would consider opening a museum of their own in Winnipeg.