Breathing Archives

Breathing Archives 1 Wordless — Falling Silent Loudly, Curated by Barbara Höffer and Léontine Meijer van Mensch, Japanisches Palais, Dresden, 2021 @ Michelle Eistrup 

Politics of Silence publication 
https://s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/fourcs-content/files/1323/original/politics_silence_final.pdf?1648466579

Artistic direction and editorial coordination Direção artística e coordenação editorial Luísa Santos
Editorial Assistance Ana Fabíola Maurício

Interview #2
Meeting with Dr. Birgit Scheps-Bretschneider.
21st October 2020, GRASSI Museum für Völkerkunde zu Leipzig. This interview is with Dr. Birgit Scheps-Bretschneider by Michelle Eistrup. Dr. Birgit Scheps-Bretschneider is Head of Provenance Research and Restitution, Curator for the Australian and Pacific Collection.

Breathing Archives So when I started to be responsible for the Collection of Human remains, I took over nearly 6500 items from all over the world. There was an application from the Hawaiian nation people to get back their ancestors, and they were asking for them for more than 25 years. I thought it was impossible not to react and not to respond, and then I tried to work out the legal conditions to give back human remains to their descendants from where they came. And I realized by reading the German culture protection law that there was no possibility of giving them back to other countries or other people. So I was thinking about finding a gap in this law, and I just took the German constitution. This paragraph I.1. says that people have their dignity, and that’s the most important thing that the state has to protect. This paragraph is also valid for people who died, as sections cover the people’s rights in the German law book. So it defines that they have the right that somebody takes care of their bones and that somebody has to make sure they get burials according to the culture and religion. With these paragraphs, if you change these bones that are objects in these collections back into human beings, then we can use this legal way for returning them to their families and countries. The next step is to look for injuries or things that might give a bit more de-tailed information about the context and how this person died. And for example, if you have a skull with a big hole in it, you can think about somebody who got shot, or if it has cracks in it, maybe you can conclude that they had been struck on the head or if they have deadly injuries that healed. And I hired a coroner to tell me more about the different sorts of damages on their bodies. With the results, she found out that it was possible to look when these remains came into the house, and then you have a specific time horizon. Then you can try and look into the log of history. At that point, I start to look for partners in the country to find out the Community that is probably closest to this person’s origins. With local history and oral tradition, you get a lot of information that comes together with these injuries, the robbery of graves, or other circumstances that give a little more about the persons you have. And usually, we don’t find individual names that are more or less; luck, if that happens. Through tradition, the communities have known who got killed in the massacre and whose body disappeared from a grave or traditional burial. And they miss these persons up until today. And so it happens that we come close to a community, where many have been affected. And the community can decide whether they try to take over the responsibility for their ancestors or declare them as ancestors. So that, for instance, happened with Yawurru and Karajarri in Broome, Western Australia. We could go with the Community, more in-depth into the local history of pearling, and when we had these hints, there were diving jobs without equipment, but in deep-sea diving, we could explain the strangest things that the coroner found in these skulls of the divers. They had grave, heavy ear problems, so heavy that they started to change the bone inside the head. If you know that they were kids or women, they must have had real torture in their last days of life. And we had persons with broken fingers and broken bones, and the people would tell us that they know from their grandfathers or their great grandfathers that the pearling boss had thrown the men into the water, and they were not allowed to come back to the boat until they went back to the harbor. So they had to dive and had to stay in the water to have a rest. When they started to hold their hands on the boat, the boss would beat their fingers. The Pearlers thought that they might just come on board and have a fight with them or something. So the workers were often terrified, so they had put all their efforts to keep them in the distance and let them work. So that’s an awful story that came out. With the communities, we would discuss how to handle this fact because in Broome lived the descendants of these work teams and the Pearlers’ descendants, and we wanted to avoid that new conflicts would start because of this old story. And we found a way to talk with the elders and the great-great-great-grandson of the seller, and he was shocked because he didn’t know much of this story, and the Community knew these stories from their great great grandparents. Still, you usually hesitate to believe all these cruelties. So we had the proof for these stories, and we had all these individuals that came out of the Broome area, so Roebuck Bay was a very concrete place. We could trace what was given with the bones when they came into the house, and we had the story of who sold them to the museum. (...) At the time, many scientists competed to have the rarest items in their [Museum] Collection. And you could sit on your desk in Berlin or Dresden or Freiberg or Paris, and you could order in London; skeletons or skulls or parts and bits of human bodies and then this company would give order through a bone hunter in the country (...) For Australia, we know that (...) these professional bone hunters went together with mounted police or with native police troops. They accomplished massacres and put the bones of the dead people in their pockets. They went to hospitals, and they went to prisons. In Queensland in Brisbane, in the archive, I found a file describing a psychiatric clinic in the late 20 century that had Aboriginal people, sick people, and they just let them starve to death to sell the bodies. So it was a business where you could become very, very wealthy, and I’m sure that in Europe, nobody was thinking about it so they ordered the bones and didn’t know about where they came from or how they could trade organize having all of these dead people. So they regarded it as a standard business like buying bread and butter. And I think that’s a story we have to tell. There are all of the cruel incidents in the colonies, the brutal things in the heads of the Germans, the scientists, and the collectors.

Breathing Archives 1 Wordless — Falling Silent Loudly, Curated by Barbara Höffer and Léontine Meijer van Mensch, Japanisches Palais, Dresden, 2021 @ Michelle Eistrup.

Breathing Archives, Sketch for Silkscreen Print, Leipzig 2021.Collages made for photographs of flaked stones in Grassi
Museum combined with Archival documents of purchase of Australian artifactsand human remains. 1 of 10

Donation Dec. 1894

Ethnographic Objects

From Mr. Suffert, presently in Dresden.

16 Boomerangs (6 with symbols) from Broome

1 larger ‘‘ for killing fishes, flies out only downwards. Broome

3 Spears with glass spearheads from Wyndhorn and

Fitzroy R (Throwing stick missing)

9 Glass spearheads, same.

3 Shields from Broome

3 Stone axes in handles, made later. 100 M. ö. v. Lagrange Bay (100 miles east of Lagrange

Bay – B.S.)

7 Messenger stick (also amulets) from Broome

1 Weights (synclinal) from Broome

1 Wooden bowl for eating from Broome

3 Bones – Nose piercings (also for taking blood)

from Broome

3 Shell bands of the women of Broome

1 Jewlery for women made from Kangaroo teeth from Broome

2 Mother of pearl arm bands, also worn in hair

(rarely), from Broome, (1 double)

5 Mother of pearl loin covering on a belt of human hair

from Broome

3 the same, smaller

1 Oppossum hair loincloth for men from Broome

__________________________

Together: 62 Objects

1 Human skull from Broome

Also compare the Manuscript of Suffert about NW. Australia

In the ‘‘research materials‘‘ Broome, Roebuck Bay,