Berlin Museum Returns Artifacts to Indigenous People of Alaska

BERLIN — The foundation overseeing state museums in Berlin returned nine artifacts to indigenous communities in Alaska this week after it determined that they had been taken from a burial site in the 1880s.

“The objects were taken from graves without permission of the native people, and thus unlawfully,” said Hermann Parzinger, the president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which oversees Berlin's publicly funded museums.

“Therefore, they don’t belong in our museums,” he added.

The items, which included several masks, a wooden idol and a baby basket, had been in the collection of Berlin’s Ethnographic Museum, though they were never exhibited publicly. From 1882 to 1884, they were taken by Johan Adrian Jacobsen, a Norwegian adventurer and amateur ethnographer acting on behalf of the museum.

In front of members of the media on Wednesday, Mr. Parzinger handed a fragment of a large wooden mask to John F. C. Johnson, a representative of the Alaskan Chugach people. Both men, wearing white cotton gloves, held the mask between them for photographers.

The return of the items comes at a time when European museums are being called on to put more effort into provenance research and to return objects acquired in ways that were unethical and would now be unlawful.

During a visit to Burkina Faso last year, the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, vowed to make the return of African art a “top priority.”

“African heritage can’t just be in European private collections and museums,” he said at the time.

In Germany, where most provenance research has focused on art looted during the Nazi years of the 1930s and ’40s, the subject of provenance research into objects taken in earlier times has been a matter of some controversy. Although Germany’s empire was much smaller than France’s or Britain’s, it had several African colonies and acquired many objects for its museums from these territories, as well as from other parts of the world.

Bénédicte Savoy, an art historian and outspoken critic of current curatorial practices in Germany, last year quit the advisory board of the Humboldt Forum, a huge new museum under construction in Berlin, in part to protest the lack of research into the provenance of its collection. Professor Savoy, who both heads the modern art history department at Berlin’s Technical University and holds a professorship at the Collège de France in Paris, has since been hired to advise President Macron on the repatriation of African art.

When it opens next year, the collection of Berlin’s Ethnographic Museum will be incorporated into the Humboldt Forum, along with the Asian art collections of other Berlin museums.

Monika Grütters, Germany’s culture minister, announced on Tuesday that the new director of the Humboldt Forum will be Hartmut Dorgerloh, who currently leads the organization in charge of historic palaces and gardens in Berlin and the surrounding area. Although the Humboldt Forum will have to grapple with questions of restitution and postcolonial sensitivities, these are not major features of Mr. Dorgerloh’s current position, which he has held since 2002.

Mr. Johnson, the representative of the Chugach people, said at a news conference Wednesday that he had first traveled to Berlin in 2015 in search of the artifacts, which he said he had known about for a long time.

“Our people are traders,” Mr. Johnson said, but “they would never trade burial objects.”

Once the objects get back to Alaska, they will be returned to the Chugach community, he added, and will be displayed in community centers or local museums.