Full Description
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.
Contents
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
