Native Notes

Today’s Nordic News Daily reports that increasing fish stocks and migration of species to new areas are among the consequences climate change is expected to have for fish stocks in the sea.

While the general consensus is that global warming will disturb marine eco-systems, researchers are less certain about the scope of the consequences, it emerged from a conference in Bergen, Norway, on Thursday and Friday.

Just over a hundred delegates from the Nordic Region, the EU and Russia attended the conference and discussed the potential consequences of climate change for fish stocks and fisheries management.

“Cod stocks in the north-east Atlantic will probably grow and expand in a northerly direction, for example. But we don’t know to what extent,” stressed Dr. Randvi Ingvaldsen of the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research.

In general, warmer water will lead to larger fish stocks, but at the same time a number of species run the risk of being wiped out in certain areas. On the other hand, fish species will be able to migrate to new areas as the water temperature rises.

“This might, for example, mean anchovies and swordfish in the Baltic,” said Professor Brian MacKenzie of the Danish National Institute of Aquatic Resources.

“Levels of salt content will also be important in the Baltic, as well as climate change,” MacKenzie reminded delegates. If the salt content falls further, cod in particular will find it difficult to survive.

“Changes in fish stocks’ migration patterns are likely to become a major fisheries-policy issue,” predicted Helga Pedersen, the Norwegian Minister of Fisheries and Coastal Affairs. The current agreements about the geographic distribution of fishery rights between nations will probably have to be revised, which many believe will be a difficult process.

Over the past several years I’ve had a series of conversations on this issue with Russel Barsh of Kwiaht, the Center for Historical Ecology of the Salish Sea and Stuart Harris, Director of the Department of Science and Engineering at the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. Our sense was that, for Indian tribes, changes in the migration of fish stocks will not only raise significant intergovernmental and intertribal legal issues, but very important health, identity, cultural and religious ones as well. Will we need new songs, new stories, new design motifs? Will we need to reexamine our histories to see how we adapted to past changes in climate and see if and how those lessons can be applied today?

To address (not answer) these and related questions, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation and the International Institute for Indigenous Resource Management are sponsoring the Workshop on Adaptive Governance and Climate Change. The workshop will be held at the Wildhorse Resort and Casino in Pendleton, Oregon on August 19-20, 2008. The agenda and other information will be posted on the Institute’s website.

On Wednesday, November 7, 2007 at 7pm at the Lewis Sharp Auditorium, Denver Art Museum, the Douglas society, Alianza, the Denver Art Museum and the Alliance Française de Denver are hosting a lecture by Stéphane Martin on the new Parisian museum dedicated to non-western art and cultures - the Musée du Quai Branly.

According to the notice, Stéphane Martin will speak about the idea of an ethnographic museum in a country where the question of indigenous peoples isn’t discussed with as much intensity as it is in the United States. The Musée du Quai Branly assumed the duty of envisioning the specific way of displaying the artwork of these peoples, carrying on discourse about them and portraying their representatives’ voices.

Sounds good so far but this is the same Stéphane Martin, who has refused New Zealand’s request for the Quai Branly museum to send back the four tattooed Maori heads (mokomokai) in its collection.

The New York Times today reports that [s]ince 1875, the mummified, tattooed head of a Maori warrior has been part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Natural History at Rouen in Normandy.

But when Rouen’s mayor arranged recently to return it to New Zealand as an act of “atonement” for colonial-era trafficking in human remains, the national Ministry of Culture stepped in to block him.

The ministry contends that the head is a work of art that belongs to France and that its return could set an unfortunate precedent for a huge swath of the national museum collections — from Egyptian mummies in the Louvre to Asian treasures in the Musée Guimet and African and Oceanic artifacts in the Musée du Quai Branly.

Stéphane Martin, the director of the Quai Branly museum, agreed with the ministry that the head should stay in France.

“From my point of view, they are cultural artifacts that had a function in society,” he said. “Sending back these artifacts to New Zealand, and destroying them by burying them is a way of erasing a full page of history.”

Suffice it to say that we do not agree with Mr. Martin’s views. Our views are documented in an International Institute for Indigenous Resource Management paper, Mokomokai: Commercialization and Decsacralization by Christian Palmer and Mervyn L. Tano. That paper has been selected for inclusion in the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre. The Centre, part of Victoria University of Wellington, digitizes significant New Zealand and Pacific Island texts.

According to an article in the New Zealand Herald, Te Papa Museum officials appear to be dealing with the issue as they have previously done–quietly and under the radar. Paul Brewer, Te Papa marketing and communications director states: “It’s an issue between the museum and the French Government and they need to be comfortable that everything is being done according to their own systems.”

Mr Brewer said Te Papa would stand back from the issue while that happened.

He said repatriations of preserved Maori heads and body parts from foreign countries were ongoing and Te Papa would focus on other issues in the meantime.

The return of cultural items was a relatively new practice for the global museum community and it would take time for institutions to feel comfortable with it.

“The fact that a number have allowed us to repatriate human remains is fantastic, but we’re not going to be successful by shouting from the rooftops,” he said.

“The way we will be successful is just quietly maintaining cordial relations with the institutions.”

We, at the Institute, wonder, though, how the family and tribe feel about the characterization of the head as a work of art that belongs to France.