Germany hands over 2 Indigenous masks to Colombia as it reappraises the past : NPR

BERLIN — Germany handed over to Colombia on Friday two masks made by the Indigenous Kogi folks that had been in a Berlin museum’s assortment for greater than a century, one other step within the nation’s restitution of cultural artifacts as European nations reappraise their colonial-era previous.

The picket “solar masks,” which date again to the mid-Fifteenth century, had been handed over on the presidential palace throughout a go to to Berlin by Colombian President Gustavo Petro. The choice to restitute them follows a number of years of contacts between Berlin’s museum authority and Colombia, and an official Colombian request final 12 months for his or her return.

“We all know that the masks are sacred to the Kogi,” who reside within the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains of northern Colombia, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier mentioned on the ceremony. “Might these masks have an excellent journey again to the place they’re wanted, and the place they’re nonetheless a bridge between folks and nature at the moment.”

Petro welcomed the return of “these magic masks,” and mentioned he hopes that “an increasing number of items might be recovered.” He mentioned at a later information convention with Germany’s chancellor that the Kogi group will in the end resolve what occurs with the masks. He added: “I would love a museum in Santa Marta, however that is my concept and now we have to attend for his or her concept.”

Konrad Theodor Preuss, who was the curator of the forerunner of at the moment’s Ethnological Museum in Berlin, acquired the masks in 1915, throughout a prolonged analysis journey to Colombia on which he gathered greater than 700 objects. In accordance with the German capital’s museums authority, he wasn’t conscious of their age or of the very fact they weren’t purported to be offered.

“This restitution is a part of a rethink of how we take care of our colonial previous, a course of that has begun in lots of European nations,” Steinmeier mentioned. “And I welcome the truth that Germany is taking part in a number one position on this.”

Governments and museums in Europe and North America have more and more sought to resolve possession disputes over objects that had been looted throughout colonial instances.

Final 12 months, Germany and Nigeria signed an settlement paving the way in which for the return of a whole bunch of artifacts generally known as the Benin Bronzes that had been taken from Africa by a British colonial expedition greater than 120 years in the past. Nigerian officers hope that accord will immediate different nations that maintain the artifacts, which ended up unfold far and broad, to observe go well with.

Hermann Parzinger, the pinnacle of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Basis, which oversees the Ethnological Museum and others in Berlin, famous that the background is especially complicated within the case of the Kogi masks.

They weren’t “stolen in a violent context” and Colombia was already lengthy since an unbiased nation, he mentioned. Preuss purchased them from the inheritor of a Kogi priest, who “apparently wasn’t entitled to promote these masks” — which means that their acquisition “wasn’t fairly right.”

“However there’s one other facet on this dialogue of colonial contexts, and that’s the rights of Indigenous folks,” Parzinger added, pointing to a 2007 U.N. decision stating that artifacts of religious and cultural significance to Indigenous teams needs to be returned.