First Nations remains return home to Vancouver Island

Members of the Tseycum First Nation from the Saanich Peninsula of southern Vancouver Island arrived home from New York City Thursday morning with some deeply personal cargo that left the island more than a century ago. 

For the last four years, Cora Jacks has been on what she said was a nearly obsessive quest to recover the remains of her Tseycum ancestors from museums around the world.

On Thursday, she and her husband, Chief Vern Jacks, returned home with some of those remains.

"Our people don't belong in boxes in a museum," said Vern Jacks. "This is our life. We still respect our dead."

Long journey home

While the flight home took just a few hours, the search to find the remains was a complicated one that began several years ago.

"I fell across some papers about an archaeologist named Harlan Ingersoll Smith," Cora Jacks said by phone from New York Wednesday .

'It's important they be able to come home and rest in peace.' — Cora Jacks, member of the Tseycum First Nation

Further research revealed that Smith was the former head of archaeology at the Geological Survey of Canada at the beginning of the 20th century.

Like many archaeologists of the time, Smith made a business out of digging up remains from native burial sites around B.C., which were then sold to museums around the world, with the proceeds often funding research expeditions to remote areas of the province.

"Five dollars for a skull and anywhere from $7.50 to $10 for the whole remains," said Cora Jacks.

The practice was common among archeologists and museums at the turn of the century, and like the remains of many other indigenous people from around the world, some of the bones of 50 of the Tseycum forebears were bought by the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

And that's where earlier in the week a special ceremony was held to honour the remains, before they began their journey home.

Ceremony held in New York museum

"I think the ceremony was a tremendous relief for our people — from the young to the old," Jacks said before boarding her flight home.

"I realized how important it was to determine where those remains were."

She said she was pleased with the museum's reaction to the request to bring the bones home.

"They were amazing," Jacks said. "They were extremely helpful from the first time we contacted them."

Charles McLean, senior vice-president for communications and marketing at the museum, said a process was already in place to address repatriation issues. He said there had been at least one other occasion when the museum had returned remains.

"The museum is certainly willing to consider requests from legitimate sources for the repatriation of remains," he said, though he noted that human remains make up a tiny portion of the 30 million items in the museum's collection.

Members of the Tseycum community visited to the museum Monday. They held a ceremony, singing and praying over the boxes containing their ancestors' remains.

"I think everybody here at the museum was very gratified at the outcome," McLean said. "It was a very moving ceremony."

Remains arrive on Vancouver Island

On Thursday morning, Cora and Vern Jacks and their ancestors' remains touched down in Victoria, their journey home nearly complete.

Another ceremony will be held Friday on Vancouver Island to mark the return of the remains to their resting place, Cora Jacks said.

"It's important they be able to come home and rest in peace," she said.

But for the Tseycum First Nation, the quest is not yet entirely over. The band says there are other remains at the Field Museum in Chicago, and it plans to start the repatriation process with that institution. The museum did not return a call seeking comment.

The band will now turn its attention to Europe where other remains still remain tucked away, gathering dust in the collections of museums as far away as Copenhagen, Cora Jacks said.

She said she plans to continue her efforts to recover them until all of her ancestors are returned to their proper resting place.

The repatriation is especially important for the younger members of the Tseycum First Nation, she said.

"It gives the young people a sense of how to correct something," she said.