I doubt I'll ever get to touch a kakapo, but we live in a part of New Zealand where kiwi releases happen every so often, and the kids (and bigger people) get to touch the kiwi as they are released into the wild(with radio trackers attached).
Their feathers are very unusual, not feathery at all but more like a fur in texture, quite unusual, and were also used to make cloaks etc.
We also have kiwi living in the surrounding bush and can hear their cries at night. A couple of years ago I found a kiwi egg lying on the ground, it from quite some time for my brain to register what a giant egg was doing. That resulted in quite a bit of administrative activity, eventually getting the egg to the department of conservation for them to analyze it's cause of demise.
As a small example of what rarely happened in any British Mueseum in the past[1]:
> In addition to skills sharing, one of the key aims was to include culturally appropriate care in the conservation process. PMAG was already in the process of forming a memorandum of understanding with the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa) – so they were brought on board as the third partner of the project. Awhina Tamarapa became the Māori curatorial adviser on the team.
So, small baby steps.
Full feather cloaks are striking when fresh and worn, eg a full emu feather cloak [2]
There are only 252 kākāpō left.[1] Really seems like Critically Endangered Conservation Status should have more grades, as kākāpō is the same status as western gorilla with as many as 50K individuals and the vaquita estimated at less than 10 individuals.
I'm pretty sure "Show image caption" is not part of the title …. (It's weird that the title deleted the content-ful, non-clickbait word 'known', but grabbed, I guess, an errant bit of HTML.)
They probably got the title from copying the visible heading on the page, which includes the "Show image caption" icon.
The removal of "known" is probably a result of "Caring for the only known full kākāpō feather cloak in the world Show image caption" being too long for an HN title.
"Caring for the only known full kākāpō feather cloak in the world
Show image caption"
Code -
<h1 id="paragraph-30476-title" class="hero__title hero__title--small"> Caring for the only known full kākāpō feather cloak in the world</h1>
....
<span class="visually-hidden">Show image caption</span>
I don't think a bot would pull the span in as well.
The British museum can not make up for it's I'll gotten items by having some ceremonies for a cloak.
Perhaps I'm culturally ignorant. But if it wasn't for guilt why on Earth would they have ceremonies around a cloak? I suspect the Maori did not have ceremonies around their cloaks. But I guess the advisor has to show worth somehow.
Still won't make up for stolen bones of Africans that were grave robbed. Or the the proceeds of military conquests and out right pilthered items they have in the collection.
I'm far from an expert on Maori culture but central to their worldview is the concept of "mana", which is essentially spirit. Your own mana and that of your ancestors was incredibly important, and that mana could be imbued in items.
Exchanging gifts of mana was a big cultural/social tradition. It seems reasonable that a valuable and distinctive item like a feather cloack would have had a lot of significance and tradition surrounding it. That doesn't mean there were cloak specific prayers but I doubt the ceremonies were completely baseless.
When they talk about the ceremonies and personify the cape (which does sound a bit odd the way it's written in the article) I'm pretty sure it's referring to the spirit of the previous owners, and I'm not surprised that Maori with a traditional sense of spirituality would find a lot of religous importance in that.
I think it's dumb to request the British museum to return priceless 'stolen' artifacts when they were mainly gained by digging through rubble and abandoned sites anyway. And the countries that are requesting these items back lack the stability to ensure their safety and preservation. Yes, even Egypt is unsafe. As evidenced by their revolution where the Egyptian National museum was robbed, some artifacts stolen, and ancient grave sites pilfered in the last decade. Suffice to say that this situation is much worse for a lot of African countries. Is it culturally appropriate to keep these items? No, not really. But when the alternative is possible destruction, I would rather they keep them and piss everyone off.
Last month I saw a child on the tube leave their weird tablet on the seat as their parent dragged them away.
Should I have kept the tablet? I'd have looked after it better than the child. Before they forgot about it they were mashing it pretty hard. They could break it despite the stupid case on the thing.
I hope you'd suggest give it back to them (don't worry I did - and am still bragging about it to strangers weeks later apparently).
The underlying ethics is the same imo. You shouldn't take stuff from others no matter how they are treating their stuff. It's theirs.
Timelines matter here. Nation states separated by centuries are different than a child on the tube. At a certain threshold things become human history and we should be able to rise above "Finders keepers"/"No it's Mine" arguments over artifacts and instead find the best stewards.
What gives us the right to tell Egyptians that they are not the best stewards for their antiquities?
Let's flip the narrative because I suspect you've spent too much time thinking about this problem only from one side.
And I know this is far fetched. Let's imagine the objects began vanishing and it became apparent an alien nation had taken them for safe keeping.
They say Earth is not safe for these objects, they know how to maintain them and inspect them better than humans can. These objects will be viewed by trillions of beings on distant planets next to other objects they safeguard from other planets. Planets we could never possibly visit maybe the Jeff Bezos' and Musk's of the world get to visit and look at these objects.
Would you say, oh I'm sure they know how to look after and appreciate those objects better than we do?
I suspect not and ultimately you may realise this is really the same old might is right ideology.
>What gives us the right to tell Egyptians that they are not the best stewards for their antiquities?
Well, for one, modern Egyptians have hardly anything in common with their ancient Egyptian-Pyramid-Building ancestors, even genetically they're fairly different since the Arab invasions...they profit off the tourism industry of these ruins, and the country actively has segments of the population that still considers them heresy and wants to destroy them. But the tourism brings in a LOT of money, so any valuable artifact is important. There's a large black market of stolen artifacts. Written Papyrus scrolls are illegally found and broken up into small pieces and sold as cheap kitch, making deciphering the original document impossible. Even to this day.
>And I know this is far fetched. Let's imagine the objects began vanishing and it became apparent an alien nation had taken them for safe keeping.
Their objects didn't "vanish". In your example, it would be like Aliens coming in and began digging through our piles of rubble that we long didn't give a shit about and found something valuable. Nothing was stolen. At worst, they came and conquered our lands and dominated us for 50 years, and still...they went digging through our rubble and found valuable shit that we didn't care about. We used the big rock piles of old buildings that the heretics built ages ago to build our homes, apparently there was more to it... even though in hindsight we probably damaged these precious relics in the process but let's not even get to that.
Suddenly, our old trash is valuable. Culturally, historically, we have little in common with this trash, but it's apparently valuable to someone else. They took it. Decades later we learn a lot more about these objects through these Aliens, and we understand why they are important to our history. We now want them back. And we are...acting entitled because we feel like they stole them from us? From our trash piles? It just sounds like sour grapes to me.
This is the situation we are in right now, at least with the example of Egypt.
Look up "Mummy Brown" to see just how much Egyptians gave a shit about Egyptian history and culture until the British came and gave it value. I don't discount that the educated metropolitan Egyptians legitimately care about these artifacts by the way, but there's still segments of the country that only see it as profiteering opportunities, and worse still, want to destroy them. I don't get the entitlement that they deserve these artifacts back. They didn't care about them until someone else found them and gave them value. All of a sudden it's now relevant again? After they told us why its important?
I think we disagree fundamentally about rights in this situation.
It's their objects and it'll never be ours.
We wouldn't let Egypt come into Britain unearth items and take them back to Egypt.
Ultimately that they couldn't stop us makes it okay for you.
For me that is just 'might is right'.
In the story above the kid neglected his tablet. That doesn't make it mine if I want it.
My nephew will often cry if I start playing with a toy despite him originally neglecting it.
I give him his toy. Because it's his.
If I found a childhood toy in a friend's backyard I wouldn't walk off with it. It's still his. Should he die it would belong to his estate.
When these objects were taken, most of the time laws were broken. No one questions this. Occasionally it was just bullied away.
Sometimes it was just stolen.
People are still stealing objects from other countries. And it is wrong no matter how much they think they would value it more. [0]
I think you're not really seeing my point. Nobody here is a kid. You acting as an adult comes off from a position of benevolence towards children, which is in its own way belittling to Egyptians as a former colony of England. Like England the parent should do the 'right thing' in your opinion to Egypt its child.
Modern Egyptians don't have anything in common with ancient Egyptians. The artifacts found were in places long abandoned and forgotten, sometimes in places looted in antiquity. Sometimes in the middle of the desert. I don't understand what laws you think were broken. The British didn't raid any museums or enter people's homes (in so much as dig beneath them where the people had NO idea anything was there). They actually built the museums in Cairo where these artifacts are stored. Is there a proportion of artifacts that were taken from Egyptians, possibly stolen by the British? Absolutely. But the modern Egyptians owning those artifacts have so little in common with the ancient Egyptians that their own possession comes from theft anyway. The difference is the British used them for archeological purposes that gave the artifact a different value. There is so little claim to genealogical ancestry by modern Egyptians that its preposterous to even have this conversation from. Especially when they've been looting and smashing grave sites since antiquity. [0] The history of ancient Egypt is the history of the World at this point. But its within the interests of Egypt As The State to safeguard its treasures because they derive their (quite profitable) national identity from it.
FWIW, archeological expeditions happen in foreign countries all the time, and the ownership of found objects is pretty clearly negotiated before a dig site is even planned. It would be fucking stupid for a university to finance a trip where it actually can't possess or at least lease out the items it finds. Obviously, in countries embattled by instability and corruption it's much harder to fairly negotiate the status of artifacts, like in the article you linked.
Fundementally we disagre about rights. I think all within a country is owned by that country. That could be gem stones or antiquities.
I don't think invading a country gives you ownership over their belongings but you seem to wrt the British Empire. No more than Russias claims to Ukrainian grain.
I think Egyptians are capable of making decisions about their national belongings themselves and they have decided that they are better guardians than Brits. Inexplicably you seem to think they can not make this decision.
Ultimately you're view that British stole from 19th century Egyptians antiquities and now they belong to Britain is simply might is right thinking.
The idea that Brits are better caretakers of these items is not dissimilar original justification. Africans are too barbarous to look after their own assets.
What do you think of the Benin Bronzes. For me they are essentially similar morally. I suppose you'd say it was wrong to take them, but they looked after them, and now they shouldn't be returned?
I don't know, I think we tried a few times and are simply yelling over each other at this point. You're refusing to understand my argument. I don't think it will benefit either of us to continue on. So this will be my last reply.
>I think Egyptians are capable of making decisions about their national belongings themselves and they have decided that they are better guardians than Brits. Inexplicably you seem to think they can not make this decision.
I'm not saying that they're incapable. I'm saying they're not entitled to those artifacts because they never dug them up in the first place. I didn't steal from you because I went through your trash you left on the side of the road. The fact that I found something precious that you want back is frankly your entitlement being met with the reality that you didn't know what you had was valuable. That's entirely a "you" problem. Not a "me" problem. Modern Egyptians were looting and smashing tombs far before the British arrived, and in fact kept the practice up during and after the British left.
>Ultimately you're view that British stole from 19th century Egyptians antiquities and now they belong to Britain is simply might is right thinking.
I'm not saying "might is right thinking". I'm saying one man's trash is another man's treasure. The Egyptians never excavated the artifacts that are under hot contention. It was the British that went digging and excavating. Before the British, Egyptians were smashing and looting tombs and selling the gold and jewelry[0]. The British even built the national museum in Cairo in which Egyptian artifacts are stored, among the things they took back.
>The idea that Brits are better caretakers of these items is not dissimilar original justification. Africans are too barbarous to look after their own assets.
The justification isn't that Africans are too barbarous. Egypt is still a very corrupt country, that still sells artifacts on the black market for profit. A population of Egyptians still go out of their way to destroy these artifacts because they consider them blasphemous against their religion. When it comes to the question of stability, yes: the British would be better safekeepers. This one among other reasons why the Egyptians aren't entitled to those artifacts. They didn't dig them up. They didn't keep what they found safe. Now they want what the British have because the British dug their artifacts up and kept their artifacts safe.
>The idea that Brits are better caretakers of these items is not dissimilar original justification. Africans are too barbarous to look after their own assets.
Again, my point is that they don't own those assets. They never found them. The British did. Once more: Just because I went through your trash and found something valuable does not make you entitled to that trash. You threw it away.
> Again, my point is that they don't own those assets. They never found them. The British did. Once more: Just because I went through your trash and found something valuable does not make you entitled to that trash. You threw it away.
Here's what you don't understand, if you break into my home. Beat me up. Raid my kitchen trash take and item and walk off. That item is not yours.
If I dump an item in international waters yes take salvage. But on my land it is mine.
And I agree this will be my last reply.
The Johnny Harris series is excellent on the mentality of imperialism that led to raids allover the world. Watch if you like it's from a couple days ago but critises the precise logic you're using to steal
It's telling that the British Museum doesn't address the elephant in the room: will they be returning the cloak to the Maori people?
If not, why not?
While it's laudible that they contribute conservation and reconstruction expertise to projects like this - they are well funded and this is in their mandate, after all - if the ultimate goal doesn't include a discussion of returning the cultural history to the people and places it was taken from, then this just more whitewashing of troubling colonial attitudes that continue to this day.
They probably got used until they were worn out, while this one's been safe in storage. They weren't designed and made to be museum pieces, but to be worn (not for everyday purposes so much as ceremonially as a symbol of power and respect).
John Oliver did a segment on this recently. The British Museum is amazing, but you don't have to dig very deep or think very hard to find some very uncomfortable truths.
Their feathers are very unusual, not feathery at all but more like a fur in texture, quite unusual, and were also used to make cloaks etc.
We also have kiwi living in the surrounding bush and can hear their cries at night. A couple of years ago I found a kiwi egg lying on the ground, it from quite some time for my brain to register what a giant egg was doing. That resulted in quite a bit of administrative activity, eventually getting the egg to the department of conservation for them to analyze it's cause of demise.