[todeen]

Originally Posted by Exhibitman

Yet another gray area, Tim. There is certainly less freedom of choice on the colonial end, but there is still room for agency. If a local gave the mask as a gift to an outgoing English bureaucrat, that is a lot different than someone busting into a local museum and taking it. Or, to put it into a context much closer to home, a Native American artifact could have been stolen from a site, taken as a prize in war, traded for in peace, or found on the roadside. The closer you get to looted, as in the case of all of the forced art sales that the Nazis did, the less legitimate title is (even that required a new law to give the families of the victims a remedy).

You're not wrong. But it makes me think of Native American Reservations. They just kept getting smaller and smaller. Every generation or so, the Feds were moving the goal posts on what Native American support should entail. Some of the land was lost out of legal land sales to white farmers. But the reservation leaders were selling because they needed money. Capitalism and Native Culture often didn't co-exist well...until they discovered Casinos. Anyway, even legal sales or gifts can often be interpreted as theft when the group in power have put those without power between a rock and a hard place.

I took a Native American class last year, and they were teaching us about a wampum belt. It had been given to the white government at the time, and eventually made its way to a museum. After a court battle that it was not meant to be on display, it was repatriated to the local tribe. It has rarely been seen again. I think this happened in the late 1970s. This example is an extreme example of gray. It was the intersection of legality, ethics, and culture.