From Amy Shakespeare
A brand-new website, Routes to Return, aims to open up global networks, share information, and enable international repatriation from European museums to Indigenous Nations and Communities around the world.
The first free resource on the site, Understanding the European Museum Landscape, is aimed at Indigenous Nations and Communities. The resource tracks the repatriation progress of European countries and museums to provide a helpful lens for Indigenous Nations and Communities to gage which countries are open to repatriation, where to search collections, and how to make claims.
The resource gives an overview of the European repatriation laws, policies, guidelines, and potential approaches that can be useful to know before beginning repatriation efforts in Europe. It offers a summary of some of the common themes in approaches to repatriation across Europe, as well as country-by-country breakdowns of the national laws, policies, guidelines, and approaches to the return of ancestors and belongings.