After 120 Years Stored in a Museum, an Indigenous Shrine Returns Home

Taken from a First Nation community in Canada, the shrine recently began a more than 3,000-mile journey back from the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

In the early 1900s, Franz Boas, who is considered one of the founders of American anthropology, became fascinated by a large shrine associated with Indigenous whaling rituals off the coast of British Columbia.

He had been sent a photograph of the shrine, which belonged to members of an Indigenous group called the Mowachaht. It showed a wooden structure on a small island, surrounded by a tangle of cedar and spruce, that sheltered 88 carved wooden human figures, four carved whale figures and 16 human skulls.

Boas decided to acquire it for the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where he was a curator. He was driven by a concept known as “salvage anthropology,” in which researchers saw collecting Native cultural possessions as a way to safeguard them from destruction as Indigenous populations plummeted.

Even at the time, the acquisition was controversial. A researcher named George Hunt traveled to Yuquot, a village near the shrine, to try to purchase it for the museum. According to letters between him and Boas that were published in “The Yuquot Whalers’ Shrine,” Aldona Jonaitis’s 1999 book on the subject, a chief agreed to sell it for $500, only to return the money the next day following objections from his community.

Hunt wrote that he eventually convinced two chiefs to split $500 in exchange for the shrine. But he added that the chiefs made him agree not to take the shrine until much of the community had left the island for the Bering Sea, where they often went seal hunting.