"What we are trying to show is that we aren’t losing anything but creating space for more expansive stories," she said. Marenka Thompson-Odlum, a research associate who helped to curate the new displays, explained that removing the artifacts should not be considered a loss. The museum began an ethical review of its artifacts in 2017 in order to identify and prioritize displays that "required urgent attention because of the derogatory language used in the historic case labels or because they played into stereotypical thinking about cultures across the globe." RELATED: Auschwitz Museum Calls TikTok Trend of Teens Role-Playing as Holocaust Victims 'Offensive' “We don’t want to be thought of as dead people to be exhibited in a museum, described in a book, or recorded on film… Our ancestors handed over these sacred objects without fully realizing the implications," Shuar indigenous leaders, Miguel Puwáinchir and Felipe Tsenkush, explained in the statement. The Shuar and Achuar communities - who created the tsantas - have long argued the removal of the heads from museums. "The removal of the human remains also brings us in line with sector guidelines and code of ethics.” "Rather than enabling our visitors to reach a deeper understanding of each other’s ways of being, the displays reinforced racist and stereotypical thinking that goes against the Museum’s values today," she continued. These exchanges led "to a steep increase in violent warfare" at the time. While the heads have been one of the museum's most popular attractions since the 1940s, museum director Laura Van Broekhoven said that many visitors found the remains as "a testament to other cultures being ‘savage’, ‘primitive’ or ‘gruesome'."Īccording to the museum, during the 19th and 20th centuries, the shrunken heads were collector's items and were often traded by colonialists. RELATED: Spy Museum Plans to Change Torture Exhibit After Outcry from LawmakersĪmong the remains removed are the South American tsantas, also known as the "shrunken heads," which were acquired by the museum between 18. According to The Washington Post, decolonizing is described as "a process that institutions undergo to expand the perspectives they portray beyond those of the dominant cultural group, particularly white colonizers."
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