This panel investigates the ongoing legacies of colonial and imperial extraction in the Américas by examining the contested fates of sacred objects and the ethical, spiritual, and political demands for their return. Historically, colonialism and imperialism in the Américas were enacted through the theft of sacred objects; the legacies of dispossession are often reflected in their continued display and displacement. In this panel, three scholars present individual case studies from the Latina/o Américas to highlight the importance of relationships between religious groups and material religion and the disruption of these relationships when sacred objects are taken, stolen, (or otherwise acquired) from communities of origin. Together, these papers highlight the importance of “care” and “return” of sacred objects: Peruvian Catholics asserting the importance of cultural patrimony when three stolen paintings are discovered in Miami, Florida; the activist art of Glicéria Tupinambá in working to repatriate sacred objects housed in museums to her community in Brazil; and insight into ethical concerns and responsibilities related to processes of repatriating of sacred objects from collections housed at the Fowler Museum at UCLA.
In September 2024, a sacred object over 300-years removed from Brazil’s Tupinambá indigenous community returned to terra brasileira. A cloak of bright-red feathers, tied with intricate knots and sealed with local beeswax, the manto Tupinambá holds deep sacred and ritual importance for Tupinambá people, their activation central to communicating with more-than-human powers. Yet, until 2024, all existing cloaks were held exclusively in museums outside of Brazil. Artist Glicéria Tupinambá has been central to efforts for repatriation of these sacred objects. This paper tells the story of her multiple museum encounters with mantos Tupinambás: visiting European museums to study colonial-era cloaks, taking up cloak weaving for museum display, and merging art and activism through video-art installations. Theorizing secular aesthetics of museums in Brazil, this paper teases out Glicéria’s striking investment in museums, her work within and against the confines of museum institutions, and the persistent museological management of sacred Tupinambá objects.
Drawing primarily on examples from the Fowler Museum at UCLA, I will explore a variety of ways in which an institution that holds a significant number of sacred objects (or ancestors, relatives, non-human beings, etc.) in its collections can engage in processes of return. Responsible stewardship in contemporary museums increasingly includes negotiating the return of sacred materials to communities of origin or their recognized descendants. As understood here, "return" broadly encompasses a range of collaborative engagements between the museum and represented groups, including deaccessioning and repatriation as well as collaborative storage and care. In my discussion of specific cases, I will highlight key issues concerning the ethics and responsibilities of collection and collection management.
Around late 2016 and early 2017, the Peruvian Ministry of Culture with the assistance of the American FBI came to the realization that three stolen paintings from Cusco, Peru were in Miami, Florida. The investigation located all three paintings on the grounds of Corpus Christi Church within the city. Upon the extraction of these paintings, the parish community not only felt jilted but greatly questioned why the paintings could not stay with Corpus Christi, especially considering that a majority of the church's practitioners were Peruvian citizens. This situation highlights the significance of religious art in diaspora communities and the greater question of what defines cultural patrimony among Peruvian citizens living outside of the country. Religious paintings and artifacts are the center point of practitioner devotion and cultural exhibitions, but where do devotional paintings belong and who determines those circumstances? This paper explores these questions both in sentiment and practice.
In this unit, I think this paper pairs with the interests in museum studies, theory and method in Latin American contexts, and the work of emerging scholars.
If the unit chooses not to accept the paper, it may be relevant to the Religion, Film, and Visual Culture unit, particularly that unit's interest in film adaptation. Adapting Glicéria's work to the filmic/video context specifically for the museum required shifting and restituting the way the arguments (both artistically, theologically, and visually) were made. Ultimately, visuality and film have become a central aspect of how she has told her story and become a central figure in indigenous activism. This has involved collaboration with the aegis of museum institution.