Back home Buxton museum praised for returning First Nation artefacts

When Taa.uu 'Yuuwans Nika Collison first opened the email from Buxton Museum, she was, she says, "sort of in shock".

- Esther Addley

Collison is a member of the Haida nation, the Indigenous inhabitants of a remote archipelago called Haida Gwaii off the very far northwest coast of Canada. For 25 years she and others had been lobbying museums and collectors around the world to return items made by her people back to their homeland, often with very little success.

Yet, here was a curator from a small town in Derbyshire she had never heard of, saying it had some Haida items in its collection, and it wanted to send them back.

Bringing home part of your cultural heritage can be emotionally overwhelming, says Collison. "Once someone or something has returned home, that's where the healing comes in, [the knowledge] that you've upheld your responsibility to your ancestors."

Buxton's offer to the Haida was part of a remarkable year-long initiative in which the small local museum has returned an entire collection of Native American and First Nation artefacts - 51 items in total - to their original communities. The last of them, 12 objects including ceremonial stone weapons, flint arrowheads and a medicine bag, were dispatched last month to members of the Siksika nation in Blackfoot Crossing, Alberta, Canada, just days before the project closed at the end of January.