Over the course of more than a decade, the Haida Nation triumphantly returned home all known Haida ancestral remains from North American museums. In the summer of 2010, they achieved what many thought was impossible: the repatriation of ancestral remains from the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. The Force of Family is an ethnography of those efforts to repatriate ancestral remains from museums around the world.

Focusing on objects made to honour the ancestors, Cara Krmpotich explores how memory, objects, and kinship connect and form a cultural archive. Since the mid-1990s, Haidas have been making button blankets and bentwood boxes with clan crest designs, hosting feasts for hundreds of people, and composing and choreographing new songs and dances in the service of repatriation. The book comes to understand how shared experiences of sewing, weaving, dancing, cooking and feasting lead to the Haida notion of “respect,” the creation of kinship and collective memory, and the production of a cultural archive.

Cara Krmpotich is an assistant professor in the Museum Studies program, Faculty of Information, at the University of Toronto.

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‘This work is beautifully crafted contribution to repatriation and critical heritage studies… Highly recommended.’

Choice Magazine vol 52:04:2014

‘This sensitively written and insightful ethnography takes repatriation out of the control of museums and places it in a specific community as it tries to repair the damage inflicted by over a century of social and cultural trauma.’

BC Studies Issue 197