ABSTRACT

In the last 30 years, the repatriation of Native American artefacts to their North America source communities has begun to reset the balance of power between Native American people and museums. This chapter presents an even more fraught situation, a wrongful repatriation. In 1998, over 80 Anishinaabe ceremonial artefacts from a small anthropology museum at the University of Winnipeg were secretly given to a politically-adept, well-intentioned Ojibwe cultural revitalization group unrelated to the source community, in spite of clear provenance and significant interest in the collection within the source community. Nevertheless, the attribution of animacy provides a metaphysical prelude to the social agency of drums, allowing Ojibwe speakers to readily incorporate meaningful artefacts in explanations of events. In the case of the Naamiwan's water drum, its Ojibwe personhood is similarly relational, shifting meaning from person to object within the dictates of its social connections.