The Force of Family: Repatriation, Kinship, and Memory on Haida Gwaii
© 2014
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.
Product Details
- World Rights
- Page Count: 240 pages
- Illustrations: 26
- Dimensions: 5.9in x 0.7in x 9.0in
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Reviews
‘This work is beautifully crafted contribution to repatriation and critical heritage studies… Highly recommended.’
K.S. Fine-Dare
Choice Magazine vol 52:04:2014‘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.’
Gillian Crowther
BC Studies Issue 197
“There is no doubt that this book is an important contribution to our understanding of Haida communities and the impact of repatriation on their understandings of themselves, as well as what our understanding of repatriation following the Haida should be.”
Joshua A. Bell, Curator of Globalization in the Department of Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution“A readable and nuanced discussion of Haida culture and the changes it has experienced during the ‘repatriation era.’”
Robert K. Paterson, Professor of Law, University of British Columbia“The Force of Family explains the intimate tie between Haida repatriation and kinship in its associated forms of memory, history, and respect. This is a book that gives the reader a real understanding of Haida concerns and approaches when it comes to repatriation.”
Larry J. Zimmerman, Professor of Anthropology and Museum Studies, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis -
Author Information
Cara Krmpotich is an assistant professor in the Museum Studies program, Faculty of Information, at the University of Toronto. -
Table of 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
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Subjects and Courses
