What happens next? Exploring connections between repatriation, restorative justice, and reconciliation in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The collection and use of Indigenous ancestors and their belongings for research and display in museums has contributed to losses of cultural patrimony and to the intergenerational trauma reverberating from Indigenous peoples’ experiences of colonialism. Repatriation movements, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and related Indigenous rights activism have begun to transform heritage management practices. As of 2022, in Canada and elsewhere, legislation and national policy require heritage practitioners to engage with Indigenous descendant communities and to repatriate ancestral human remains and other cultural materials. The return of ancestors and cultural materials can remediate traumatic histories, reconnect individuals with culture and community, and serve as a form of restorative justice. However, involvement in repatriation work may also carry unanticipated challenges, including struggles with unclear policies and procedures, timelines that extend for years and decades rather than weeks and months, and high financial and spiritual burdens for descendants. Many museums also perpetuate colonial dynamics by clinging to decision-making authorities and otherwise resisting change to accommodate Indigenous values, interests, and preferences. The three case studies presented here examine connections among repatriation, restorative justice, and reconciliation: 1) The return of a Tłı̨chǫ caribou skin lodge; 2) The reproduction of traditional Gwich’in clothing; and 3) The repatriation of ancestral human remains and other-than-human ancestors to Bkejwanong (Walpole Island First Nation). Each case scrutinizes what happened after repatriation was “completed” and identifies the effects that repatriation/rematriation processes and outcomes can and do have on Indigenous descendant communities. The cases also provide contexts for discussion of the roles that repatriation should play in ongoing reconciliation efforts here in Canada. Repatriation has the potential to be much more than a process of return. Conducted in good faith, with open minds and hearts, it can bring benefits to receiving communities across social, cultural, political, economic, and spiritual dimensions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.045 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".