This painting is often misread by settlers as a role reversal: an imagined act of vengeance upon colonizers. But to see it as revenge is to once again see through the eyes of colonialism, replicating its same mechanisms. What is expressed here is far more profound.
This is what rematriation looks like: sacred power returning to the soil, the bodies, the breath of this continent.
It is ceremony stretched across time, where tenderness dares to meet trauma and does not become it. The Land Back movement does not wish to mirror the blade of conquest. The Land Back movement extends the medicine of memory, the salve of restoration. It teaches that healing is relational, that the oppressor too has been disfigured by the machinery of empire.
Colonialism severed all of us from the sacred, leaving us hollow and haunted in different ways. It taught us to hoard, dominate, fear one another. But this has been an inherited fear passed through generations until someone decides to create a new path.
The new path signaled in this painting.
The work ahead is not to punish or displace, but to reconnect. To disarm the heart. To return what was taken, yes, but also to repair what was severed in all directions.
What Charles Hilliard offers is not merely a reimagining of North America, it is a global invocation. A visual promise that healing is possible. That rematriation begins when we dare to remember. And that remembrance, fierce, tender, and rooted, is the healing balm.
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These museum workers had gathered ... to oversee and document artist and musician Satch Hoyt “un-mute” the African instrument collection, as he calls it.
A masterful player of wind and percussion alike, Hoyt has been working to gain access to African instrument collections in colonial and ethnographic museums so that they may be played again. Within certain African diasporic traditions, some of these instruments are understood as tools to communicate with the creator and ancestors. Thus, this un-muting is not a mere symbolic act protesting the enforced dormancy of museum storage, but an affirmation of fluid continuity between the living and ancestral realms.
Un-muting points to the urgent need for rematriation, not only in terms of repairing frayed ancestral ties, but crucially, in maintaining the instruments’ integrity:
“Instruments need to be played. If they’re not, they literally dry up. Every first violinist in a philharmonic or symphonic orchestra is playing a Stradivarius which is on loan. Why aren’t any of these instruments that are in these ethnographic museums on loan? Why aren’t they being played?”
When Hoyt was finally granted access to the British Museum’s African instrument collection in 2023, after three toilsome years of negotiations, he was asked to sign a waiver itemizing a litany of poisons (arsenic, lead, mercury, methyl bromide, ethylene oxide, DDT, etc.) that were pumped into the instruments, agreeing that if he were to fall ill or drop dead upon playing them, the British Museum would not be liable.
seriously nothing more unattractive than a selfish, egotistical, lustful man with zero emotional intelligence that does not possess any concern or interest in how deeply they’ve internalized patriarchal capitalistic character flaws that uphold every single system of oppression that exists and is quite literally killing the earth and humanity at unprecedented rates more than ever but they are too dumb as fuck to even know what that means or even read all of this because they’re either involuntary celibate and/or are deeply seduced by materialism and privilege to distract from how much they actually hate themselves and are actual literal pieces of shit
Earlier this month, Nyamakop unveiled Relooted, a new video game where players stages heists to take back stolen artifacts from Western muse
"As Nyamakop lays out on the game’s listing on the online video game marketplace Epic Games, Relooted takes place in a near future where “the political powers that be brokered a Transatlantic Returns Treaty, promising the repatriation of African artifacts from museums.” But the hitch in the treaty is that it only applies to artifacts on “public display,” leading museums to circumvent the requirement by placing the pieces in highly guarded private collections. And that’s where players come in: scoping out a given facility, carefully constructing an exit route, and then, of course, stealing the artifact and escaping.
As Ben Myres, the creative director of the game, explained to Epic in a news post, all of the artifacts in Relooted are based on real-world pieces in Western museums."
Trajectories and Movements of Filipino People: Diasporic Objects and Possibilities for Rematriation, Marian Pastor Roces (Alliance Français Manila, September 7, 2024)
(Photos from Tara Illenberger, Facebook. We attended the same talk, though I was not able to take much photos as much, since I was not seated at the front. 😅)
Would like to start this post by saying that it was such an honor to have met Marian Pastor Roces again. For my would-be followers who are yet to read my blog posts, especially those who are situated abroad, I would like to introduce Marian Pastor Roces to you. MPR is an art critic, museum curator (and creator, in a comical sense), writer, political analyst, and cultural critic. She has hosted the establishments of numerous cultural initiatives that concern cultural heritage of ethnic groups in the Philippines. She is also a writer of essays and books, and an editor for Mapping Philippine Material Culture — a global archive of the different diasporic Filipino art and antiquities.
I met her the first time when I hosted a talk for her at my university. Terrific woman. I wish I had learned about her way sooner, from when I was a kid. Then, I would not have been so indecisive of what I wanted to be when I grew up and knew that I wanted to be a cultural heritage lawyer from the start, haha!
Something this talk proved further was the very principle that
cultural objects have memory too,
much like how much of the movements of Filipino people are reflected in the movements of its cultural objects.
Click read more to read the notes I got from the talk! ⬇️
There were three events that mark as significant events and turning points in the movements of the Filipino people.
Austronesian Migration: Wherein a seaborne migration set sail from the island of Taiwan to Batanes, in Northernmost Philippines. Objects traced and left behind by our Austronesian ancestors revealed marks of cultural connections along their trail.
1887 Madrid Exposition: Wherein maltreatment from the colonial Spaniards sought to display people of the Igorots in Human Zoos. The Filipino people have become an object themselves according to the colonizer.
Philippine Diaspora and Globalization: Wherein Filipino artifacts are now dispersed in cultural and archival institutions globally. Now, the material culture heritage of the Philippines is in large measure overseas. Filipinos do not have access to much of the material evidence of our heritage. Among the outcomes of this unknowing is an abyssmal loss of measures of quality that Philippine Peoples enjoyed until about a century ago.
The substantial collection of the National Museum of the Philippines was nearly totally destroyed during the Second World War, the same event which led to the adopted of the 1954 Hague Convention, briefly discussed in the previous post.
Material Culture Studies were not a significant area of work for Philippine Studies during the Post-War Period.
Philippine Material Culture collections started to be an activity in the 1970's.
What is lost to the Filipinos, as diasporic objects are detached from them?
Key pieces that embody the most ✨ sublime ✨ levels of cultural expression in material form by specific Philippine Peoples. Here, Marian does not refer to these pieces by the quantity of cultural objects being produced, but by the quality of it. You can get traditional, authentic fabric anywhere in the region where the community resides — but all the ones that were made special, limited, and ceremonious are all stored in museums abroad.
Key pieces for which no equivalent exists.
The full range of variations of certain traditions, as expressed by the artists of specific community.
The opportunities to study continuities or commonalities between and among parts of the Philippine experiences that are normally separated.
Accurate analysis of what is Philippine — and thus to inform policy.
WHO DO YOU RETURN THE OBJECTS TO? Repatriation vs. Rematriation
Repatriation:
Nation-state as destination of return.
The loss of legitimacy or ethical high ground of holdings of powerful entities.
Rematriation:
Not return to the state — but the people who made them.
Though legal processes are able to create a process for repatriation, you cannot template rematriation.
You need to built trust with the community you are rematriating to.
The Legal Practice and Rematriation:
Cultural Heritage law centers more on private/institutional ownership (i.e. cultural property). However, Cultural Heritage is inherently collective. Hence, what we need is a legal basis for cultural custodianship as well — in collaboration in both the communal (discourses among the ethnic group), and international (UNESCO).
Enumeration of Investigative Directions that will have useful impact on Policy, Governance, Philantrophy, Grassroots Work, and International Relations, with regard to Philippine Material Culture
The celebration of global peak achievements in material culture.
The acknowledgement of Philippine Material Culture as rooted in village cosmologies that are shared across island Southeast Asia.
The establishments of living links between past and future art.
The metamorphosis from village to supra village ethos.
The fullsome recognition of a different way of being human in this part of the world.
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"By the sixth century B.C.E., when Buddhism developed, the memory of pre-patriarchal society had been erased [in India]. Warfare, intensive agriculture, highly stratified societies with strong social and economic hierarchies, and male dominance socially and religiously, had become the expected norms. Buddhism, as we have seen, did not really participate in that society, but it did not seek to criticize and reform it either. Instead, its elite withdrew from that society into the countercultural monastic sangha, but they structured their own alternative society by incorporating into it the same values and norms regarding male dominance, while rejecting for themselves, but not society in general, virtually all other current conventions and norms, including militarism, agricultural labor, hierarchy of social caste, and economic self-sufficiency. For its non-monastic larger sangha, Buddhism relied upon prevailing Hindu and Confucian social codes, with their strongly defined gender roles in which women and men were seen as complementary, though not of equal importance. These social norms, already entrenched in pre-Buddhist culture in India and East Asia, included a clearly defines 'women's place.' That 'place' was one of formal subordination to males, whether father, husband, or son. Furthermore, that "place" was understood to involve family life, marriage, and reproduction, first and foremost. By and large Buddhists seem to have preferred that women stay in that 'place' and not seek refuge in monastic sangha.
Why was Buddhism so accommodating to its social environment, especially regarding gender arrangements? For on this issue alone, it accepted prevailing conventions, not only for the wider lay society but also for countercultural alternative society. And it did so despite developing its own dharma that is remarkably free of gender bias ['the dharma is neither male nor female']. This is an extremely tough puzzle to solve, more difficult than the emergency of patriarchy itself. But I believe two interlocking factors may explain Buddhist conventionality and conservatism on this issue. First is the fact that male dominance was already there as the norm for gender relations and second is the fact that Buddhism did not attempt to reconstruct or reform society because it saw withdrawal, rather than reconstruction, as the only feasible relationship with the larger society.
Had Buddhism been fortunate enough to enter history in an egalitarian rather than patriarchal society, it would just as happily have accommodated itself into that situation."
--Rita M. Gross, Buddhism After Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction of Buddhism
In the "rematriation" movement, Indigenous farmers retrieve centuries-old seeds from museums and plant them in ancestral lands for tribal justice and food security.
It’s early July, and Jessika Greendeer moseys along a row of head-high Mandan Bride corn, carefully weeding between the stalks while their tassels poke skyward. All around her, dozens of plant varieties grasp the earth with their roots—sunflowers track the daylight, beans and chilis hang on their vines. Greendeer, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation from Wisconsin, manages this 30-acre farm and Indigenous seed bank for the nonprofit Dream of Wild Health in Hugo, Minnesota, a town about 18 miles northeast of Minneapolis-St. Paul. Many of her charges have survived over generations, making them heirlooms of sorts.
