LA’s Fowler Museum Returns 20 Artifacts to Warumungu People of Australia

The University of California, Los Angeles’s Fowler Museum returned 20 objects “of significant cultural importance” to the Warumungu community of Australia’s Northern Territory on July 24, the university has announced. 

The official handover ceremony was overseen by university officials, two Warumungu elders, and representatives of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), a government agency dedicated to the repatriation of local cultural heritage. 

“It’s very important that a lot of these artifacts are coming back for Warumungu people,” Warumungu elder Jones Jampijinpa, who worked closely with the Fowler on the return, said in a statement. “A lot of those artifacts that museums have went before us, and we didn’t even see them.” The Fowler, a museum focused on art from Africa, Asia, the Pacific and the Indigenous Americas, has stressed that the return was “voluntary and ethical”. 

Six years ago AIATSIS established the Return of Cultural Heritage (RoCH), a program tasked with investigating museum collections worldwide for objects of cultural importance. At least 200 institutions have since been contacted by RoCH with requests to examine their holdings. The Fowler was among those that responded positively to conversations regarding the possible return of art and artifacts to their communities of origin. In 2022, two members of AIATSIS visited the Fowler to confirm the authenticity of the Warumungu objects, half of which were gifted to the museum in 1965 by the Wellcome Trust in London. The Fowler received around 30,000 objects through the Wellcome Trust, named for Sir Henry Wellcome, a British pharmaceutical entrepreneur. 

The Fowler has been actively pursuing repatriation in recent years. In February, the museum returned seven objects looted from West Africa’s Asante Kingdom to Manhyia Palace in Kumasi, Ghana, the seat of the current Asante king.

The return was made possible from a 2019 grant (totalling $600,000) from the Mellon Foundation to research its collection from Africa—some 7,000 objects—with a focus on its gifts from the Wellcome Trust. Museum researchers determined that seven items had been stolen from the Asante Kingdom during the Sagrenti War, also known as the Third Anglo-Ashanti War.

“At the Fowler Museum, we think of ourselves as temporary custodians of the objects in our collection,” Fowler director Silvia Forni said in a statement. “In the case of pieces that were violently or coercively taken from their original owners or communities, it is our ethical responsibility to do what we can to return those objects. It is a process that will occupy generations of Fowler staff, but it is something that we are unwavering in our commitment to accomplish.”