The project is titled “Getting Our Stories Back” in response to the loss of cultural knowledge and belongings imposed by settler-colonialism, missionization and forced assimilation, , declaring it “primitive” Indigenous knowledge not only in Alaska. Mostly white actors collected the Indigenous material cultural belongings and took many of them away from their original communities. Many of these cultural belongings ended up in private collections or in public museums. During these times, research of Indigenous cultural belongings in museums was often problematically informed by racial and cultural evolutionary theories. The “ethnologization” of Indigenous material cultural belongings, structured and categorized by criteria of “Western sciences” since the end of the nineteenth century, participated in the erasure of Indigenous knowledges.

All three project partners, Chugachmiut, the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin, and Freie Universität Berlin with metaLAB (at) FU Berlin, would like to counter this history of epistemic violence in dealing with Indigenous cultural belongings by working with a different model.

Knowledge keepers as researchers

In “Getting Our Stories Back”, the Elders of the Chugach communities are at the center as researchers and knowledge bearers, their voices are decisive for descriptions and interpretations of objects, for recommendations on preservation and care, and last but not least for ethical dimensions of the collection concerning issues of ownership, accessibility, presentation, and restitution.

This approach is embedded in Indigenous research paradigms. Indigenous researchers have emancipated themselves in recent decades from the hegemonic Western academic model, which mostly made Indigenous cultures the “objects of research”. They developed their own differentiated approaches to research, articulating knowledge as fundamentally relational, emphasizing the role of Indigenous languages, the responsibilities of researchers, and the role of communities. Researcher-participants of European research institutions, such as the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin and the Freie Universität Berlin with metaLAB (at) FU Berlin, are thus challenged to critically examine their research cultures and the question as to who benefits from research and its results.

Project results

“Getting Our Stories Back” further addresses the question who gains from projects of this nature by supporting local institutions and structures in the Chugach region. With the integration of the data concerning the cultural belongings from the collection housed in Berlin into the database of the Indigenous organization Chugachmiut, the sovereignty of interpretation and data will pass into the hands of Chugachmiut.
At the end of the project, annotated indigenous protocols will be published by all project partners. The aim is to present implemented forms of cooperation and the approaches used in dealing with the cultural heritage.This document can serve as a guideline also for other Indigenous groups in their collaborations with museum institutions and contribute to the reconnection of collections and knowledge cultures.

Between 1881 and 1883, the Norwegian sailor Johan Adrian Jacobsen traveled the Pacific coast of Canada as well as Alaska on behalf of the Königliches Museum für Völkerkunde (today’s Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin) with the goal of building a collection from the region for the museum. During these travels, Jacobsen acquired, among many other artefacts, nearly 500 cultural objects from the Chugach region, primarily from Sugpiaq, Dena’ina, Eyak, Ahtna and Yakutat Tlingit communities. Jacobsen’s extensive travelogue allows to trace his itinerary as well as the means by which he acquired cultural properties. In his records he meticulously noted the prices he paid for the objects which were very low in relation to the cost of travel and transportation logistics. Some of Jacobsen’s methods gathering objects were criminal, such as looting of burial sites.

Adolf Bastian, the founding director of today’s Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin, who commissioned Jacobsen's journey to the Northwest Coast, was a proponent of the so-called idea of a “salvage anthropology”. European anthropologists in the late 19th century assumed that Indigenous cultures would either adapt to settler cultures or even die out. Therefore, they wanted to create material culture archives of the different Peoples in museums. Motivations – such as gaining academic prestige in the establishment of the then young discipline of “anthropology” and the idea of the superiority of European civilization – also played a crucial role. Last but not least, the competition between museums triggered the efforts of collectors to gather as many objects as possible.

Beginning of the joint exchange

In recent decades, historic collections have formed a focal point of interest to some Indigenous groups in their efforts to strengthen and revive their cultural heritage. One example being the Chugach Alaska Corporation, which organized the visit of a delegation of Elders to the Ethnologisches Museum in 2015. Amongst them was John Johnson, Vice-President of the Corporation and NAGPRA representative, who has worked for the Chugach since 1975, researching cultural belongings and ancestors distributed throughout various museums worldwide.

During that first visit, the delegation identified grave goods in the collection that Jacobsen had unlawfully removed from burial sites. As a result, these nine cultural belongings were returned to the community in 2018. The restitution marked the beginning of an ongoing relationship between the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin, Chugachmiut and the Chugach Alaska Corporation that led amongst others to the current project, “Getting our Stories Back”.