Hola from Asuncion, Paraguay,
Imagine a museum paying indigenous people for artifacts; paying a reasonable price; negotiating in good faith with the people who were the original creators of those artifacts.
This would be to avoid the deceptions caused by the theft of the so-called Elgin Marbles from Greece, now housed in the British Museum, the same museum’s questionable right to house Egyptian mummies and the Natural History Museum’s custody of Australian Aborigines’s skeletons and other artifacts.
Some of the original artifacts were paid for, but the vast majority were simply expropriated by a colonising power operating on the presumption that they had a right to seize such property.
In Paraguay, the founder of the Ethnographic Museum in Asuncion adopted a different approach. Andres Barbero respected the people who had been the creators sufficiently to institute a policy of negotiating an agreed price. He was dealing with a people on an equal footing, accepting the truth that those people had a right to value their property, to sell it by their own choice, and to bargain in good faith. He wasn’t just protecting a future source but respecting the people on a level footing.
Unfortunately, I can’t include any photographs from the museum as there is a forthcoming publication soon to be issued which includes many such photographs. Mariala from the museum explained that the policy of paying indigenous people for their weaponry, artifacts and remnants remained a policy to this day, maintained by successive directors.
Mariala was a font of knowledge about the South Americans, who so often refer to themselves by saying, “we are all Mestizos”. Mariala says living as a South American is living in “the delights and the shadows”. Being a Mestizo in a continent where most respect the fact is the delight. Living with the remnant European racism sometimes creates a more sinister side to the experience.
Adios from Asuncion
Gregorio