Week 24-26: Where have you been?
resting my brain & reading a lot of books
Hello from the other side of July and then some, where the summer has unceremoniously dumped me after a few weeks of sitting under a beach umbrella, reading as many books as I could and keeping an eye on library news (made much easier by Colleen Theisen’s weekly round-up).
repatriation updates
In recent weeks, there has been a stream of reports of various repatriation efforts: The Brooklyn Museum returned 1,300 objects to Museo Nacional de Costa Rica; the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt returned the leather shirt of Chief Daniel Hollow Horn Bear, of Teton Lakota, to his great-grandson; Canterbury Museum returned ancestral remains to Rangitane o Wairau iwi, a Maori tribe, after 60 years of requests and advocacy; And the US returned over 17,000 objects to Iraq, including the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is considered the oldest written-down story and is basically about a guy who misses his best friend, so he embarks on a search for eternal life. Standard narrative stuff.
Many of the objects seized by the US government were looted during the US invasion in 2003: cultural theft is recent and present, not just an ill of yesteryear. 12,000 of the objects came from Hobby Lobby’s Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., and the president of Hobby Lobby shifted blame to “unscrupulous dealers” for leading the organization astray which…
Hobby Lobby’s acquisition of looted objects is a really good example of how bad things can get if you heavily prioritize pursuing an institutional or material narrative over adhering to ethical standards that, yes, make things more time-consuming and laborious, but will guard against working with shady dealers and unvetted provenance. All heritage institutions are guided by missions, and many of those have associated narratives (e.g. “What story are we trying to tell?” “What audience do we serve?” “What is the value of these materials?”). And professional standards exist to ensure that fulfilling that narrative does not come at the expense of ethically-sound acquisition, categorization, and use. These instances of repatriation are also a great example of why collecting should not happen in a vacuum. It’s easier to avoid these mistakes when you work with colleagues who can point out potential pitfalls; siloing ourselves into our own missions leads to isolation at best and outright harm at worst.
Repatriating objects is one way of rectifying the missteps of those ethically-unsound choices. It’s also an opportunity to establish new safeguards against those same missteps moving forward: I learned from the article about Rangitane o Wairau iwi that New Zealand has a government-funded international repatriation program that seeks the return of Maori and Moriori remains. This summer, Museums Aotearoa adopted a national repatriation policy of remains and artifacts or treasures. Sometimes it’s important to remind ourselves that good things are happening and that other people care too.
reading recs
All 14 books that I read in July were excellent, so here are the ones that swam around in my head for a long while after I finished them:
10 Minutes and 38 Seconds in this Strange World by Elif Shafak. The story of a Turkish woman who finds herself in Istanbul, trafficked into sex work and bolstered by friendship. Not a spoiler, because it’s on the first page: Leila is murdered, and we spend the rest of the book learning about her life—rich and complicated and filled with a lot of love.
Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff. Often blurbed as a story about marriage, but it’s more precisely a story about perspective and placation. Fates and Furies was published to high acclaim in 2015, and I think it merited that hype. I was left wondering about the characters’ choices in the end, which doesn’t signal to me that they were poorly executed, rather that the author successfully proved how many options they each had and how each ending could have been reasonably justified.
People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry. An unsurprising, trope-friendly, beat-for-beat romance book that nonetheless hooked me. I sprinted through it in under a day and understood why it’s been clanging around in book lists this summer. I read the first page and texted my best friend from college, “I just started this book that I think you’d really enjoy.” She asked which book, then responded, “Oh Shira. I have torn up those books. Beach read is also excellent,” which proves that my recommendation was dead on.
Finally, a plug for libraries: Eric Klinenberg makes excellent cases for the utility of public libraries throughout his Palaces for the People, which I recommend if you want a primer on how public land and services will repair our civic life and stymie the worst effects of the climate crisis. Reading Palaces for the People proves extremely current as the Senate hammers out the soft infrastructure investments in the mega bill, which would put money towards libraries, parks, public universities, universal pre-k, and community college tuition. Strengthening our community ties buttresses us against crises large and small, which is increasingly crucial as the fires and floods encroach on our lives.
housekeeping and birdseeking
house
I move to Indiana next week to finish this library degree shindig in person, so the newsletter will pick up again once I’m back in class and once again synthesizing what I’m learning in library school.
The full July reading list: The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris (thriller); Somebody’s Daughter by Ashley C. Ford (memoir); 10 Minutes and 38 Seconds in this Strange World by Elif Shafak (literary fiction); The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker (historical fantasy); Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life by Eric Klinenberg (non-fiction); The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis (literary fiction); Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff (literary fiction); Number One Chinese Restaurant by Lillian Li (contemporary fiction); Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson (non-fiction/memoir); The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett (literary fiction); and People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry (romance).
What I’m currently reading: The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray, which is a novelization of the life of Belle da Costa Greene, JP Morgan’s personal librarian who was assumed as white to work as a librarian and collector.
bird
the birds are (rightfully) upset with us because my parents pulled out a hedge in the backyard to make room for a fence for my sister’s dog. The birds really liked that hedge, so we’ll be replacing it with a new bird-friendly hedge.
More later.
You read Fates and Furies and liked it yay!!!!!