This project researches political and cultural processes of transfering ownership (restitution) and making physical returns from former colonial knowledge institutions in Northern Europe, including museums and archives, to Indigenous communities and societies engaged in struggles to retrieve and rehome their ancestral heritage. The meaning of postcolonial restitution thus ranges from decisions to deaccess collections by state museums and to rehome items of cultural heritage by their traditional custodians, to cultural exchanges and loans, and to returns and reinterments of ancestral remains. The broader aims of restitution include redressing and rectifying practices of dispossession and extraction that have been part and parcel of colonization.
As such, this project moves beyond the narrow juridical definition of restitution, reframing it through radical democratic, postcolonial and critical Indigenous scholarship perspectives as political, cultural and psycho-social practices that involve multiple actors and stakeholders, include creation of new meanings, draw from and activate collective memory, and have potentially redressive, repairative and democratizing effects. Reaching beyond the goals of mere ‘returnism’, restitutive struggles can also spur decolonization of knowledge institutions, including the dominant museal narratives, aesthetic choices and conservationist practices, and raise key questions about legacies and ethics of colonial collections and their holding of Indigenous ancestral heritage.
Adopting a focus on countries of Northern Europe, and including within its purview internal, administrative and overseas colonization histories, this project adopts three analytical vectors of analysis: studying selected items' transnational histories; analyzing the socio-cultural dynamics of their return, rehoming and resemanticization in the communities; and by researching new and experimental forms of restitution. Through the accomplishment of its research objectives it seeks to contribute to contemporary scholarship on the processes of addressing historical injustices and abusive state policies enacted against vulnerable social groups, Indigenous and colonized populations and ethnic minorities, and to critical assessment of legacies of (post)colonialism in Northern Europe.
