Transcription
We call them museums, but that's a euphemism. It might be better to call them warehouses of stolen loot. In 1897, the Benin bronzes were stolen from the Kingdom of Benin in modern-day Nigeria by British colonial forces. The looting of Benin City was horrific; British soldiers massacred an unknown number of inhabitants and then stole thousands of artifacts from the royal palace and court. Most of the Benin bronzes are in Western museums and private collections; hundreds are still on display at the British Museum, even though the royal court of Benin would like them back. Between 1950 and 1970, the British Museum actually sold a few pieces back to Nigeria, which is a bit like someone robbing your house and then demanding money for your flat-screen TV.
Empires of Dirt is a show about Europeans getting rich at the expense of everyone else. Previously, we found out how Bristol was built on sugar and slavery and how the tobacco lords of Scotland got rich. Throughout the 19th century, it was fashionable for Europeans to venture around the world and to auction houses in search of cool stuff they could take home with them. People like Augustus Henry Lane Fox, who was born in Yorkshire in 1827. In 1880, his rich relative died, which was a stroke of luck for him; he inherited a ton of money and the Pit River's name and estate. Pit Rivers had always been a collector and amassed an enormous collection of artifacts over his lifetime. He donated 22,000 of them to set up the Pit Rivers Museum, which is still standing today.
The Pit Rivers Museum is trying to engage with the problematic history of many of their artifacts. Curators here are working to identify which items should be returned to their countries of origin, and they're trying to decolonize how they present the items that do remain in the collection. One of the most controversial objects is the so-called shrunken heads, also known as shrunken heads. For decades, museums would display shrunken heads as a way of reinforcing racist ideas about the superiority of white people. Visitors would come and gawk at how supposedly barbaric indigenous cultures were when, in reality, they had little understanding of the cultural context of the shrunken heads. They came from Ecuador and Peru and were made of human, monkey, or sloth heads, but they weren't war trophies, as many European collectors mistakenly thought. It's believed that one of the reasons they were made was to capture the power of people's souls to increase future harvests.
In 2020, the museum decided to pull the shrunken heads from display because it felt like the way they were being presented reinforced negative stereotypes about indigenous communities. They're still trying to figure out if there's a way to exhibit the heads ethically. That's the reason why the cabinet beside me is covered up. There's other dubious stuff right here in the Pit Rivers Museum, like, for instance, this totem pole, which was bought for a mere $36 in 1901 from the Haida Nation, who are indigenous to remote islands off the coast of British Columbia, Canada. The Haida Nation has lived in the region for at least 6,000 years, but the Christian missionaries visiting their islands in the 19th century thought their possessions were unholy, so they confiscated them to be displayed in European museums.
Naga trophy skulls like this one are also part of the museum's collection. When the British sought to colonize India, they also tried to colonize the indigenous Naga people who live along the Indo-Myanmar border. They even tried to get them hooked on opium to bring them under their control. Others, like American missionaries, converted them to Christianity. For centuries, Nagas have been stereotyped as headhunters, even though some now think that this was an exaggeration from colonial officers and missionaries and that the practice was nowhere near as prevalent as thought. But it's still uncomfortable to think of museums hanging on to human remains that were never theirs to begin with. Aside from the questionable ethics of it, there's also the fact that it's part of the heritage of Naga people today, and they should be the ones to decide what to do with their ancestors' remains.
If every time you see non-Western artifacts in museums, they're presented in a way that wrongly suggests their owners were bloodthirsty and savage, it conditions the way you view those cultures both then and now. It reinforces a forced narrative of Western imperialism—the idea that Europe was somehow better than the countries they stole from and colonized. But museums around the world are waking up to the fact that taking items from other cultures and holding on to them is a bad look. In 2015, the grandson of a British soldier who looted Benin City returned two Benin bronzes to Nigeria and is planning to return two more objects in October. In 2020, the French Parliament voted to return 26 objects, including a royal throne that was seized from Benin in the 19th century. Museums around Europe are slowly realizing that exhibiting items taken by force hundreds of years ago from other countries is kind of gross, and it's about time. We can't change the past, but we can change how we engage with it in the present. And let's face it: returning something that was never yours is a pretty easy thing to do.