An analytical piece by N’dea Yancey-Bragg as published in USA Today

Ngaire Blankenberg has brought her children to museums around the world, and by now they expect to hear her point out things that shouldn’t be there.

“They are always braced for a rant,” she said with a laugh.

Blankenberg, who is South African and the director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, said seeing objects on display that may have been obtained legally, but not necessarily ethically, can make her feel “tense and uncomfortable.”

“I, like many Africans, have quite a visceral reaction,” she said. “I feel insulted, feel harmed, feel that there’s a violence associated with even that act of display, no matter how many caveats there are.”

Shortly after arriving in Washington to lead the Smithsonian, Blankenberg removed 18 pieces that were or were possibly taken from the Kingdom of Benin, in what is now Nigeria, during a British punitive raid in 1897. She replaced the objects with photographs and text explaining that displaying them without resolving the issue of ownership causes harm.

Blankenberg said she has been working with the Nigerian Council of Museums and Monuments to discuss the process of returning the works, which, according to the Smithsonian Magazine are just a few of the 3,000 looted objects collectively known as the Benin Bronzes that are now in museum collections around the world. The decision ultimately must be approved by the Smithsonian Institution’s Board of Regents.

“They belong to their rightful owners and creators, to the country and to the people who produced them,” she said. “These are gorgeous works of art that deserve to be on display, but it shouldn’t be up to us to make the decision as to how and when.”

Museums have long faced scrutiny for unethical acquisitions, and people, particularly people of color, in the industry and communities the objects were taken from have been pushing for systemic changes. Experts say although more institutions have started examining the issue, particularly in the wake of the racial justice movement fueled by the death of George Floyd, there’s more work to be done.

People and communities have for decades used the legal system to push museums to return stolen cultural objects. Experts say although more institutions have started examining and addressing the issue in the last five years the requests still face pushback and more systemic changes are needed.

“I don’t feel like this is strong area that museums are excelling in,” said Mike Murawski, a museum consultant and author of “Museums as Agents of Change.” “But there’s definitely progress happening.”

Although it’s not always clear from gallery labels, Western museums hold large amounts of material that was acquired, often in an “intense and violent way,” in the 18th and 19th centuries by military personnel with explicitly nationalist aims as well as merchants, missionaries and individuals that contributed to the work of colonization, according to Alice Procter, an Australian art historian based in London.

“There are very, very few museums that don’t have at least one object in their collections that has some questions in its history,” Procter said. “They are mirrors of their makers and their makers are overwhelmingly very wealthy, white men in the 1800s … The people who are theorizing eugenics are the same people who are creating collections to support their views, which becomes the core of a natural history museum or museum of anthropology.”

The problem persists. Arts and crafts store Hobby Lobby was fined $3 million for allegedly buying thousands of artifacts that had been smuggled out of Iraq in the early 2000s and last year was forced to return the rare Gilgamesh Dream Tablet, which the company planned to display in its Museum of the Bible, founded by owners Steve and Jackie Green.

As colonies gained independence in the mid-20th century, new nations began pushing for the return of their sacred cultural artifacts, Procter said.

“For as long as people have been taking objects, people have been resisting that process of taking and requesting the return of pieces,” she said.

The requests made little headway until the 1990s, when the U.S enacted federal laws requiring certain Indigenous remains and cultural objects be returned to the tribal lands they were taken from. Some museums continue to drag their feet on those claims, Murawski noted.

“I really appreciate when museums don’t just use legal requirements to start looking at these things,” Murawski said, adding the decision to repatriate objects can sometimes take “a decade or two.”

Procter said she noticed an increase in calls for repatriation of artifacts about a year after she started running “Uncomfortable Art” tours in 2017. The tours examined the role of imperialism and colonialism in several major British museums.

As she got more media attention, Procter said her audience “massively grew” and the museums she worked in began to take notice. In response, the British Museum started series of talks about how they acquired certain items to counter the idea that their collections were the product of colonial looting, the BBC reported.