Museum officials say they follow guidelines and recommendations, and are open to working with tribes and nations
Museum-goers check out displays in the Indigenous Arts of North America exhibit at the Denver Art Museum on May 30, 2024. Representatives of Native tribes and counties such as Cambodia and India say the Denver Art Museum has been difficult to deal with when it comes to repatriating sacred or cultural objects. The Denver Art Museum, she said after an introductory April meeting with museum staff, isn’t one of them.
They say this has earned the museum a reputation among outside parties: Negotiations with the Denver Art Museum won’t be easy. “We follow guidelines, we follow recommendations and we honor the specificity of the people and object involved,” said Angelica Daneo, the museum’s chief curator. “The museum is concerned by the fact and the principle of the proposal to give away an object from its collection,” officials wrote, “especially one which is believed to be the finest example of its type.”
The Western Apache NAGPRA Working Group — a collection of Apache tribes from Arizona — said in federal documents they felt they had provided sufficient evidence that the items were culturally affiliated with their communities. The Denver Art Museum disagreed. In 2019, an activist with a Nepali cultural heritage protection group emailed the Denver Art Museum about a limestone tablet in its collection. The tablet, depicting the Hindu god Shiva with his wife and children, had been stolen, Slok Gyawali of the
Daneo, the museum’s chief curator, told The Post that the institution has prioritized making more of its permanent collection available online. Officials have been adding provenance information to aA patron looks over the objects displayed in the formerly named Bunker Gallery section of Southeast Asia art galleries of the Denver Art Museum on Tuesday, October 25, 2022, in Denver, Colorado.
Kirit Mankodi, a retired archaeologist who helps the Indian government track down looted antiquities, said Denver Art Museum officials initially responded to him when he brought to their attention 20 years ago a stolen object in their collection. But once he drilled down on repatriation, he said, the museum ghosted him.
Denver Art museum director and CEO Christoph Heinrich walks through the Indigenous art exhibit at the Lanny and Sharon Martin Building in Denver on Oct. 7, 2021. Hoska, in a statement, said she was “sad to learn that Sunshine Thomas-Bear’s perceptions of our interaction didn’t align with my intentions, which are always to provide transparency and access to our collections for Native community members.”
The fraught relations even prompted the Denver Art Museum’s Indigenous Arts curator to issue an apology for previous comments about the museum’s collections policies.This “poorly expressed” language meant to convey the complexity of NAGPRA claims and repatriation processes, he wrote. The museum is reviewing its NAGPRA policies and “adjusting them to better serve Indigenous communities.”
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