"Once the Declaration of Independence is issued by Congress, then it kind of changes the calculus. Then, both sides are putting pressure on Native people to join one side or the other."
A commemorative bronze head, from around 1850, is a representation of the ancestor of a chief and would have been placed in the king's ancestral shrine.
The significant number of ancestors held in UK museums is extremely distressing and symbolic of the colonial origins of these collections. We hope that the responses gathered by The Guardian will be shared with the relevant communities to support them in bringing their ancestors home.
Bregman claims, 'Today the whole of Europe risks turning into one big Venice, a beautiful open-air museum. A great destination for Chinese and American tourists. A place to admire what was once the centre of the world.' This statement encapsulates the concern that Europe is losing its cultural significance.
The exquisite, jewel-encrusted boxes were badly damaged in 2024, after they were among seven treasures stolen from Paris's Musée Cognacq-Jay by a gang of axe-wielding thieves. The perpetrators broke into the temporary exhibition, titled "Luxe de Poche," or "Pocket Luxury," on November 20, making off with goods that were, at the time, reported to be worth more than €1 million.
On Tuesday, French President Emmanuel Macron appeared before the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland the annual Alpine gathering of the global elite to declare that now is not a time for new imperialism or new colonialism. This, of course, was a reference to the current ambitions of Macron's counterpart in the United States, Donald Trump, who, in addition to recently kidnapping the president of Venezuela and repeatedly threatening to seize the Panama Canal,
In 2011, the Colombian government ordered the creation of a national museum "to achieve the strengthening of the collective memory" around the decades-long armed conflict. That same year, it passed the Victims and Land Restitution Law aimed at providing victims with reparations and justice. More than just a curated collection of objects or artworks, the museum, scheduled to be inaugurated in 2018, was conceived as an archive of the violent civil war.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote about the "inalienable" rights of man in the US Declaration of Independence 250 years ago, it's possible he lifted the term from the French. And long before it was ever used as an adjective to describe human rights, it defined royal property. To this day, "inalienability" remains a cornerstone of public collections in France-and many other countries-impacting museums and their ability to deaccession, including for purposes of restitution.
Arguably the world's most famous Greek temple, the Parthenon was constructed in a flurry of building activity on the Acropolis of Athens, under the direction of the indefatigable statesman Pericles in the middle of the fifth century BC. It was a monument to recent tragedy in Athens as much as a celebration of the city's glory: The Acropolis had been leveled by Persian invaders in 480 BC, and its temples had been left in ruins for 30 years, a colossal absence reminding citizens how close they had come to annihilation.
In the autumn of 2022, Max and I walked up the iconic steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City to visit Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color. As the young son of a professional classicist, and a burgeoning one himself, my museum partner already knew about the ancient history of painted statues when we began to explore the galleries. Max's knowledge seemed the exception rather than the rule.
On August 7, 1823, 19 enslaved people in Barbados became the property of the British crown after their enslavers died without legal heirs. These individuals had names, families and histories that stretched across years of shared survival under slavery. They included Quow and his son, Caesar; Orange and her son, October; and Abel and Lubbah and their children, Thomas, Kitty and Becky.
