How one Derbyshire museum took initiative in returning Indigenous artefacts

Buxton Museum returned entire collection of Native American and First Nation artefacts to their original communities

When Taa.uu Yuuwans Nika Collison first opened the email from Buxton Museum, she was, she says, sort of in shock".

Collison is a member of the Haida nation, the Indigenous inhabitants of a remote archipelago called Haida Gwaii off the very far north-west coast of Canada. For 25 years she and others had been lobbying museums and collectors around the world to return items made by her people back to their homeland, often with very little success. Here was a curator from a small town in Derbyshire she had never heard of, saying it had some Haida items in its collection, and it wanted to send them back.