How one Nashville museum has embraced the repatriation of stolen artifacts

What do the Rosetta Stone, Koh-i-Noor diamond and Elgin Marbles all have in common? They're all dazzling objects that bear the history of early civilization — and all were taken by colonizers and displayed far from their original homes.

Governments and people from the countries where these treasures originated have long demanded their return.

"I need these unique objects back, and I will fight to return them," Egyptian antiquities expert Zahi Hawass told NPR in 2010 of the Rosetta Stone and other artifacts he believes belong to Egyptians. "Anything that left illegally, it should be back to Egypt."

In 2022, a group of prominent archaeologists launched a petition for The British Museum to return the Rosetta Stone. Other museums have also been reckoning with the looted treasures they have kept.

Sean Decatur, the president of the American Museum of Natural History, spoke with NPR last year about the task of removing and returning thousands of human remains the museum long held. Many of those belonged to Indigenous people.

"Over the course of the next couple of months, we're going to be detailing what needs to be done to do a fuller investigation of what our holdings are, of the provenance, understanding the descendant communities," Decatur said.

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The Parthenon in Nashville

Now, one museum in Nashville is acknowledging its own past and returning pieces of history to their rightful homes.

Bonnie Seymour is the registrar and assistant curator at The Parthenon and spoke with Consider This host Scott Detrow about how this journey started.

On her first day on the job, she took a tour of the museum's collection and saw hundreds of pre-Columbian artifacts: obsidian arrowheads, hand tools, a grinding stone and more.

"And my first thought just looking at it was just, 'Well, this can't stay here,'" she said. "This has to go back home."

Since then, Seymour has been on a mission to return the museum's pre-Columbian collection back to Mexico. She says it's an important goal because the artifacts represent somebody's history: "They represent someone's ancestors, and we're not them."

"Mexico has a history of people taking their things, and they have huge gaps in their history," Seymour said. "And though returning these won't fill those gaps entirely, it will help with assuaging bad feelings and hopefully solving some of the missing pieces."

Repatriation in action

The museum has a special exhibit about the items and the process of returning them called "Repatriation and Its Impact."

"I want people to come in and know exactly that this is about not just our collection, but the world," Seymour said. "I want to introduce them to the idea of what repatriation is, and that it's not an abstract idea. That it is something that impacts people on a personal level."

She says the goal is to teach visitors about the "living, breathing, thriving culture" the artifacts come from, so the exhibit also features new artwork created by Jose Vera, a Nashville artist who is originally from the same area of western Mexico as the artifacts.

Seymour says the items will be returned to Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History. One artifact she'll miss is the "Xolo dog", which she described as "this kind of basketball-sized fat dog with a grin on his face, and he's still got dirt in his mouth from when he was excavated."

"I want them to have a good life once they leave. So I'm hoping that they will be taken care of."

Listen to the full episode of Consider This to take trip to Nashville and learn more about the museums efforts to return artifacts to their original homes.

This episode was produced by Jonaki Mehta and Mia Venkat. It featured reporting from Elizabeth Blair and Neda Ulaby. It was edited by Courtney Dorning. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.