A Swiss collector who has amassed thousands of Indigenous artifacts said he is eager to have his collection repatriated back to the communities it came from.
Vincent Escriba has accumulated 3,500 ceremonial and traditional items, including cradleboards, sacred pipes and firearms, believed to be associated with the period of the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
The 67-year-old previously housed the items in a museum he ran in Switzerland that closed last year after Escriba decided to retire.
Escriba has been speaking with a group of First Nations leaders and advocates in Manitoba about transferring the collection to Indigenous groups in the United States and Canada for a cost.
“I don’t have any successors, no children, nothing. So I have to do something with the whole museum,” Escriba said in a phone interview with The Canadian Press, at times speaking through an interpreter in German.
“I decided to sell that to a good place where they should belong.”
Manitoba Indigenous advocates seek $20M to repatriate thousands of items from Swiss collection
Bettina Schmocker, Escriba’s interpreter and museum assistant, further explained that he does not want to his collection “ripped apart by private collectors.”
She said Escriba wants the items to “go back to the other side of the ocean to the people where it really belongs to.”
The Zurich-based man has purchased the items from other Swiss collectors, communities he has visited in North America and from pawnshops.
He started collecting in the 1970s, with the first item he bought being a pair of children’s moccasins from 1860.
Other items he as accumulated since then include a bandolier, or a belt worn across the shoulders. It stretches about 20 centimetres wide and consists of thousands of beads that create a floral design typically seen in Ojibwa and Cree designs.
Additional artifacts include large, feathered headdresses and sewn, leather moccasins believed to come from Sioux tribes.
He estimates the collection is valued at up to $14 million.
A delegation travelled to Switzerland to visit the museum before it closed, and is urging federal, First Nations and tribal governments in Canada and the United States to intervene to help bring these artifacts back.
The group said it needs to raise approximately $20 million, which includes the estimated cost of the artifacts and additional funds to hire experts to authenticate the items.
For some First Nations, Inuit and Métis communities, ceremonial and cultural items are viewed as a living extension of nations — ones that still have an active role in teaching and connecting community members.
“Money cannot replace anything that is live and healthy. Whatever it takes to bring these items back, we’re willing to give it a try,” Karl Stone, a councillor in Dakota Tipi First Nation, Man., who was part of the delegation to Switzerland, previously told reporters.
Cody Groat, an assistant professor of history and Indigenous studies at Western University and a member of Six Nations of the Grand River, said private collections, such as the one Escriba amassed, are common around the world.
The collection-based mentality kicked off in the 1920s when institutions and governments would lead large collecting expeditions across the United States and Canada.
“They were really trying to market Indigenous people as being exotic, as being still representative of a dying race,” he said.
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Groat said collectors maybe have good intentions when they purchase these items, but it remains a complex issue as more Indigenous groups push back and say these artifacts were often taken under duress.
Conversations around the subject are progressing, said Groat. He pointed to recent positive examples of repatriation efforts, including the Vatican returning more than 60 Indigenous items to Canada.
In some cases, these initiatives may require corporate intervention, like in the case of the HBC Royal Charter, which is on display at the Manitoba Museum after the Weston and Thomson families bought it for $18 million last year, Groat said.
