num_pages: 221
description: Over the course of more than a decade the Haida Nation triumphantly returned home all known Haida ancestral remains from North American museums. In the summer of 2010 they achieved what many thought was impossible: the repatriation of ancestral remains from the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. The Force of Family is an ethnography of those efforts to repatriate ancestral remains from museums around the world.Focusing on objects made to honour the ancestors Cara Krmpotich explores how memory objects and kinship connect and form a cultural archive. Since the mid-1990s Haidas have been making button blankets and bentwood boxes with clan crest designs hosting feasts for hundreds of people and composing and choreographing new songs and dances in the service of repatriation. The book comes to understand how shared experiences of sewing weaving dancing cooking and feasting lead to the Haida notion of respect the creation of kinship and collective memory and the production of a cultural archive.
language: None
title: The Force of Family: Repatriation, Kinship, and Memory on Haida Gwaii
publisher: University of Toronto Press