Q and A with the experts: Reclaiming Indigenous histories

Waterloo historian and anthropologist answers questions about the recovery and regeneration of Indigenous artifacts. By - During National Indigenous History Month and as we celebrate National Indigenous Peoples Day on June 21, University of Waterloo historian and anthropologist Talena Atfield answers questions about the recovery and regeneration of Indigenous artifacts, practices and knowledges. Professor Atfield is a member of the  Kanien'kehá:ka Nation of the Six Nations of the Grand River. What do people need to understand about the repatriation and preservation of Indigenous histories and artifacts? I believe that people should learn how and why Indigenous museum and archival collections were made, the impacts these practices continue to have on communities, and why repatriation can be an important tool for conciliation and healing. Most collections were built on agendas of extermination, land theft, the erasure of Indigenous presence, and literally, on Indigenous physical bodies. The perpetuation of anti-Indigenous sentiments, such as a hierarchical scale of human evolution, in which European settlers were at the top and Indigenous Peoples worldwide occupied various stages below, enabled land theft and resource extraction. This was further supported through pseudoscientific practices that boasted the ability to determine levels of intelligence and moral character through skeletal morphologies, which were used to argue Indigenous peoples had not reached the pinnacle of human evolution.