Manitoba Museum’s largest repatriation returns cultural belongings to Saskatchewan First Nation

The Manitoba Museum has returned 19 artifacts in its collection to a Saskatchewan First Nation.

The Manitoba Museum has returned over a dozen cultural items from its collection back to a First Nation in Saskatchewan, marking its largest repatriation to date.

The museum said 19 belongings, which included ceremonial pipes, a drum, an eagle fan and medicine pouches, were recently returned to Piapot First Nation.

Items also included gifts that Chief Piapot gave to the minister who conducted his daughter’s marriage ceremony, according to Amelia Fay, the museum’s curator of anthropology and the Hudson’s Bay Company Museum Collection.

“The museum is sort of shifting as well, where we’re not the legal owners of a lot of things, and perhaps we are just temporary custodians,” Fay said. “Thinking about museums’ roles with communities and trying to improve those relationships is a really strong part of what we’re doing here.”

According to the organization’s repatriation policy, which has been in place since 2007, past practices may have resulted in the acquisition of items that have “ongoing historical or cultural importance to living individuals, communities, organizations and various levels of government.”

Fay said the museum deals with repatriation requests on a case-by-case basis, adding that that part of the process involves looking at the circumstances in which the items were acquired.

“In the case of these ones that were gifts, we know that that was also at a time of hardship for Chief Piapot and many First Nations in the Prairies, and so that perhaps this is a gift—a very generous gift—but maybe one that he wouldn’t normally have done had circumstances been different,” Fay said.

“And at the same time, the son of the minister who had donated it to an early precursor of the museum had kind of maintained good relations with the nation and often thought about how they should still be able to interact and engage with these belongings.”

Fay said returning the items, which were not all on display, was also a “really good fit” as the museum focuses on the history of Manitoba—and not Saskatchewan.

“It is a proud moment for museums to really take stock of what we’re doing here and to really look at what speaks to our collections and what belongings really do rightfully need to go home,” Fay said.

Fay said the museum worked with the First Nation on the repatriation this summer and that she, along with other museum representatives, travelled to Piapot First Nation this month for a celebration put on by the community.

“We are really honoured to do this work,” Fay said. “It’s a great day for the Manitoba Museum. It’s our largest repatriation to date, and we were just so proud that it went through in such a good way.”

She said notices will be placed in exhibits that once featured the returned items to educate visitors about repatriation. Fay said that even without those items, there is “no shortage of belongings and stories that we can tell with objects that we currently have here.

“A lot of the belongings and artifacts and specimens that we have at the museum were acquired through very good means.”