For the Haida repatriation, Nika probably spoke to it. The Haida word Yahguudangang means “respect”, and with everything that we did with our ancestors, we always came back to that one word.
As you can imagine, having to repatriate hundreds of human remains is a strange thing. That's not a normal thing that anybody would have to do. We were often asked by the media, for instance, if they could come and film us as we were caring for our ancestors. We were asked if the staff members could participate. Really, there were just a lot of questions that were new to us. We always had to come back to the word “respect” and ask our colleagues as well to understand the meaning of true respect. That just made the path so much clearer for us and for our colleagues.
As I mentioned before, using the task force report really speaks to collaboration and friendship between museums and indigenous peoples. We really stood by that. We asked the museums to honour that as well. We were kind of joking about it at work the other day. We're Canadians; we're known as a friendly country, so this act should reflect that. To work in friendship is an important thing that we need to do with this.
Haw'aa.