Repatriating Cultural Artifacts
Here we have an interesting case, where we examine a huge collection of cultural objects and antiquities that were seized by the FBI in 2014 and then, fast forward to 2022 and even earlier this year in 2023, how the US government is going about repatriating some of these items.
Donald Miller
Let’s start with this guy. He was a “ethnographic collector”, never heard of that before but from this story I’m assuming that means just taking whatever he wants and stashing it in his house with the rest of his massive collection. Cultural hoarder might be a better term. As a hobby he would spend time at amateur archaeological digs which reportedly sometimes crossed the line into outright looting. He made no secret of his vast and growing collection of items and apparently his basement looked like a museum complete with glass display cases and notes on where things were found and their approximate age.
Anyways, in 2014 the FBI carried out a raid on his farm in Indiana. I wasn’t able to find why they raided him then when it had been clear for years, even decades, that he had all this stuff in his basement but I digress. At the time of the raid they discovered over 40,000 items in his collection including Italian mosaics, pre-Columbian art, and artifacts from Russia, China and New Guinea. Most shockingly, over ⅓ of the collection consisted of Native American artwork and human remains. FBI special agent Tim Carpenter said, “it’s unfortunate, but not uncommon, to find some human remains in these types of seizures, but we were certainly not prepared for what we found” (Angeleti, 2019).
As of 2019, over 12% of the collection had been repatriated to countries including China, Spain, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Cambodia and Iraq. A pair of wooly mammoth tusks were returned to Canada in 2018 as part of this effort. What is proving most difficult to identify and then repatriate is the Indigenous items, especially the bones and remains. The FBI has launched a website with strict controls around who gets to view different items as many are sacred and sensitive, so Indigenous individuals are the only ones able to view the bones and other cultural objects that may belong to them, in an effort to find where to return all these items. So far it seems like it is slow going.
In the meantime all of the items still in the FBI’s possession are kept in a climate controlled facility ready for their return. Oh and for the curious, Miller wasn’t charged with anything following the raid and died the next year, in 2015, at the age of 91.
Peruvian Repatriation
All of this leads us to 2022 when the FBI repatriated a bunch of artifacts to Peru that were voluntarily surrendered to them once the owners found out that they were stolen. The collection of items included three stone axe heads from Miller’s collection.
Other artworks in the returned lot include a 16th century painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe that was stolen from a church in Ollantaytambo in 2002 and smuggled to the US by an unknown art dealer. It traded hands via a New Mexico-based art dealer who kept it in their personal collection for a while before selling it to a California buyer in 2016. Another painting was also repatriated that was stolen in 1992 from a church in Puna and also traveled through New Mexico before being purchased by a California collector, but they don’t yet know if these two incidents are connected.
In terms of the actual repatriation, the FBI held a ceremony in LA to formally give back 16 items to representatives of the Peruvian government. “All of these objects took an opaque route into the US and now have a clear path to Peru through proper diplomatic channels,” said Kristi K. Johnson, the assistant director of the FBI Los Angeles branch (Angeleti, 2022).
Additionally, this year (earlier in 2023) the FBI repatriated two more stolen Peruvian artifacts, two khipus which are intricately knotted cords used by the Incas to count and keep records. A similar ceremony to the one in 2022 was held.
It’s very interesting to see the different approaches law enforcement agencies, galleries, museums, and other institutions are taking (or not taking, but that’s a different story) to giving back stolen or inappropriately held cultural items to their country of origin. A ceremony is one way of doing this but it also kind of serves to highlight other institutions that are refusing to do so or who won’t even discuss stolen items in their collections. Hopefully this becomes more of the norm and items will be travelling back home very soon.
Works Cited
Angeleti, Gabriella. “FBI Launches Campaign to Return Haul of Native and South American Works”. The Art Newspaper. 2019. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2019/04/10/fbi-launches-campaign-to-return-haul-of-native-and-south-american-works
Angeleti, Gabriella. “FBI Repatriates Smuggled Artifacts, Artworks, and Other Objects to Peru”. The Art Newspaper. 2022. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/04/26/fbi-repatriates-smuggled-artefacts-peru
“Peruvian Stone Axes, Paintings Siezed in 2014 Returned to their Home”. Daily Sabah. 2022. https://www.dailysabah.com/arts/peruvian-stone-axes-paintings-seized-in-2014-returned-to-their-home/news