Scottish museum faces calls to return totem pole

The National Museum of Scotland is being urged to return a totem pole, stolen from Canada nearly 100 years ago, to a delegation of First Nations leaders.

The pole was removed from a sacred “house group” in the Nisga’a Nation in 1929 by Marius Barbeau, a Canadian ethnographer and anthropologist who sold it to the Scottish museum. Hand-carved in the 1860s, it depicts the story of Ts’wawit, a Nisga’a’ warrior killed in conflict.

Barbeau, who conducted fieldwork beginning in the 1910s, has been criticised for inaccurately portraying indigenous cultures.

The repatriation of the object is in line with the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, signed by the United Kingdom, as well as with the provisions for repatriation laid out in the Nisga’a Treaty, which came into effect in 2000.

If the museum agrees to repatriate the artefact, it will be the second totem pole repatriated to Canada from a European museum. The Haisla G’psgolox pole was returned to Canada from Sweden’s Museum of Ethnography in 2006.

The delegation, which consists of the Nisga’a Nation Chief Earl Stephens, Amy Parent and Shawna McKay, will meet museum officials next week.

“This will be the first time in living memory that members of the House of Ni’isjoohl will be able to see the memorial pole with our own eyes,” Stephens said. “This visit will be deeply emotional for us all.”