Righting a wrong in Peru

The British Museum in London

I last traveled to England in 2001 as part of a study trip with Vanderbilt Divinity School. In the course of that trip, I expressed my amazement at the collection housed in the British Museum in conversation to one of our hosts. This host, a young Methodist pastor with something of a snarky personality, said, "Yeah, but none of it is ours. It's just stuff we nicked off of somebody else."

The same could be said for a lot of the historical artifacts housed in museums in Europe and the United States. In the colonial experience of the 19th and 20th centuries, both governments and universities from those nations regularly excavated and transported invaluable archeological findings to be studied and - eventually - kept in their own institutions.

It's a complicated ethical issue to consider now. Such practices were considered as natural as could be at the time. By the thinking of the time, it only made sense to take the findings of exploration and archeology to places where it could be analyzed, interpreted, and preserved. And in truth, a great deal of the archeological record would most likely have deteriorated if it had been left where it was found.

But is it right for such artifacts to stay in the museums where they eventually found a home indefinitely?

I see this as an important question, and its complication comes from the fact that it involves the intersection of international politics, academic standards, and ethics. Many nations who lost parts of their cultural inheritance to the very practices I am talking about have now developed their own cultural heritage programs, complete with departments of academic research within their universities and museums in which to preserve and study artifacts.

Machu Picchu

A perfect example: the well-known Incan site of Machu Picchu, nestled in a part of central Peru where the Andes Mountains meet the Amazon jungle. Machu Picchu was "discovered" by an explorer named Hiram Bingham from Yale University in the early 20th century, who was led to the site by local Peruvian residents of the area. Bingham's work has proved important for Peru's own work in investigating and developing its pre-Columbian history. But Bingham also transported a great deal of the movable artifacts he found at Machu Picchu to New Haven, CT, where Yale University has housed them ever since.

In recent years, the people of Peru have understandably started asking to have the artifacts back. And in a recent news release, it was announced that Yale and the Peruvian government have reached an agreement whereby the Machu Picchu collection at Yale will be returned to its country of origin.

Rev. Pedro Uchuya-Torres

I celebrate the willingness of Yale to return these crucial aspects of Peru's history to its own people. I've actually been to Machu Picchu a number of times myself. It is a spectacular site, and Peru has done a great deal of work in recent years to preserve it. The ongoing archeological work there continues to assist in interpreting Peru's own history, and the addition of the Yale collection will further that important work. A lot of both pre-Columbian and colonial history is also preserved in the national museums in Lima, and those institutions together with archeological sites like Machu Picchu together represent the archeological history of one of the most remarkable countries in the world. That history needs to be kept in Peru itself.

La Centinela, near Chincha Alta

My good friend Pedro Uchuya, a Methodist pastor in Peru, has taken me to another fascinating site near his own hometown of Chincha Alta called La Centinela. In sharing the history of the Chinchan Indians (who were eventually co-opted into the Incan Empire), Pedro has shared his own concern on a number of occasions that the history of his land be preserved. Yale's return of the Machu Picchu artifacts in its possession represents an important step to that end, and I am glad for it.

Repentance is about more than just feeling sorry for a wrong committed. It is about turning around, committing to a new path, and doing what we can to right the wrongs for which we're responsible. In that sense, Yale University is repenting for the actions of Bingham and others who - even though they may have been acting in good faith at the time - took a people's cultural inheritance away from the place where it rightfully belongs.