The Ni’isjoohl memorial pole — carved from red cedar, commissioned in 1855 C.E. to honor a fallen warrior, and taken from a British Columbia community without consent in 1929 C.E. — has come home. The National Museum of Scotland returned the 11-meter totem pole to the Nisga’a Nation, marking the first time a British museum has repatriated a totem pole to an Indigenous community.
At a glance
- Nisga’a totem pole repatriation: The Ni’isjoohl memorial pole was flown from Edinburgh to British Columbia aboard a Royal Canadian Air Force aircraft, completing a journey of more than 6,700 kilometers back to Nass Valley.
- Museum repatriation precedent: Experts say the return could open doors for other Indigenous and national repatriation claims worldwide, including Nigeria’s request for the Benin Bronzes and Greece’s claim to the Elgin Marbles.
- Nisga’a Nation welcome: Hundreds gathered to receive the pole at the Nisga’a Museum, where children placed cedar branches around it as it lay in the sun — the first sunshine it had seen, community members noted, in a very long time.
A pole taken while the community was away
In the summer of 1929 C.E., Canadian ethnographer Marius Barbeau and his team entered the Ank’idaa village in the Nass Valley while most Nisga’a people were away working, hunting, or fishing. They cut down the memorial pole and floated it downriver to Prince Rupert, where it was shipped to Edinburgh.
The pole had been commissioned by a Nisga’a woman to honor her son, the warrior Ts’wawit, who had died in battle. The Royal Scottish Museum paid between C$400 and C$600 for it — the equivalent of roughly C$7,000 to C$10,000 today.
“We never gave him permission to steal our pole,” said Amy Parent, whose great-great grandmother commissioned the pole. Parent, whose Nisga’a cultural name is Noxs Ts’aawit, led the delegation that formally requested the pole’s return from the National Museum of Scotland in 2022 C.E.
How the return came together
When Parent and her delegation arrived at the museum, the emotional weight was immediate. “As we came up that escalator, we could feel the breath of our ancestors as we walked into the Living Lands exhibit where the pole was being housed,” she told the BBC.
The Nisga’a representatives explained how the pole had been taken and asked for its return without conditions. In those conversations, Parent said the delegation found unexpected common ground with Scottish representatives — a shared understanding of colonialism and its long reach.
By December of that year, the museum and the Scottish government had made their decision. The pole would go home. It was carefully maneuvered out of a museum window and flown across the Atlantic. It arrived in Nass Valley during what the Nisga’a Nation marked as the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation in Canada — a day established to acknowledge the harms of the residential school system and colonial policies.
Eva Clayton, president of the Nisga’a Nation and a residential school survivor, called Scotland’s gesture “an incredible, kind act that will go a long way in helping to heal the hurts.” She also noted what the return signals for other families: “It sets out what we can do for our families who know about other artefacts that may have been taken from their possession.”
What this means for repatriation worldwide
Anthropologist and repatriation expert Chip Colwell called the return significant given how prominently the pole was displayed in Scotland and how central it is to Nisga’a identity. The relationship built between the museum and the nation, he said, “creates new possibilities for what museums themselves can do to repair the harms of colonialism.”
For decades, many European museums resisted repatriation requests from Indigenous peoples and postcolonial nations. That resistance is softening. France has committed to returning looted artifacts. The Benin Bronzes debate continues to pressure the British Museum. And the movement shows no sign of slowing.
“The museum world and most societies have recognised the need for repatriation as part of what it means to be a 21st-century museum,” Colwell said.
For Indigenous communities in Canada specifically, the stakes are higher than heritage alone. Historical government policies — since described as cultural genocide — deliberately targeted Indigenous language, ceremony, and objects. “The theft of their ritual items was part of that process,” Colwell said. Getting them back, he added, “is fundamental to their survival as indigenous people.”
Home in the Nass Valley
The Ni’isjoohl memorial pole now stands permanently at the Nisga’a Museum, a modern building with a glass facade set against snow-capped mountains. A place for it was carved into the ground — a symbolic and literal return to its roots.
Parent said community members will now be able to learn the story of Ts’wawit in full. “We’ve always wanted our children to be able to not work so hard in order to understand the stories of who we are.”
In Edinburgh, the museum’s now-empty exhibit space will be used to tell the story of the pole’s return. “This isn’t about us losing something,” said Chanté St Clair Inglis, head of collections services at the National Museum of Scotland. “This is about developing a relationship and telling its story in a much better way.”
Still, repatriation remains uneven. Many museums worldwide have not yet acted on outstanding requests, and no binding international framework compels them to do so. The Nisga’a return is a milestone — but the broader work of reconciling colonial-era collections is far from complete.
Read more
For more on this story, see: BBC News
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Indigenous land rights reach 160 million hectares ahead of COP30
- Renewables now make up at least 49% of global power capacity
- The Good News for Humankind archive on indigenous rights
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