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The Force of Family
Repatriation, Kinship, and Memory on Haida Gwaii
Cara Krmpotich (Author)
9781442614505
Paperback / softback, published 22 April 2014
240 pages, 26 b&w illustrations
22.9 x 15 x 1.8 cm, 0.36 kg
‘This work is beautifully crafted contribution to repatriation and critical heritage studies… Highly recommended.’ ‘This sensitively written and insightful ethnography takes repatriation out of the control of museums and places it in a specific community as it tries to repair the damage inflicted by over a century of social and cultural trauma.’
Over the course of more than a decade, the Haida Nation triumphantly returned home all known Haida ancestral remains from North American museums. In the summer of 2010, they achieved what many thought was impossible: the repatriation of ancestral remains from the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. The Force of Family is an ethnography of those efforts to repatriate ancestral remains from museums around the world. Focusing on objects made to honour the ancestors, Cara Krmpotich explores how memory, objects, and kinship connect and form a cultural archive. Since the mid-1990s, Haidas have been making button blankets and bentwood boxes with clan crest designs, hosting feasts for hundreds of people, and composing and choreographing new songs and dances in the service of repatriation. The book comes to understand how shared experiences of sewing, weaving, dancing, cooking and feasting lead to the Haida notion of “respect,” the creation of kinship and collective memory, and the production of a cultural archive.
List of Illustrations List of Tables Acknowledgements A Note on Orthography Abbreviations Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: Departures and Arrivals Chapter 3: Family, Morality and Haida Repatriation Chapter 4: The Structural Qualities and Cultural Values of Haida Kinship Chapter 5: The Values of Yahgudang: The Relationships Between Self and Others Chapter 6: The Structuring of Kinship and History Chapter 7: The Place of Repatriation within Collective Memory Chapter 8: Conclusions and Beginnings Notes Project Interviews References