Arriving by force in France in 1892, they were part of a group of 33 Amerindians exhibited at the Jardin d’Acclimatation in Paris. The Moliko Alet+Po association is now demanding the return to their land of the six individuals who died of illness in France before being able to return to Guyana.
In 2024, a Kali’na delegation was allowed to pay respect to their ancestors in the Musée de l’Homme. Each of them has a name card.
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©Jeanne Péru-Gelly
Now, the government will support a bill on their return.
“After 133 years of waiting, this is a signal that we welcome positively,” said French Guiana MP Jean-Victor Castor, who recalled how Kali’na women, men and children had been “torn from their land, taken to France and exhibited in human zoos”.
Their bodies were then “buried” and then “dug up to feed the anthropological collections, in particular those of the Musée de l’Homme”, he said. “These are not archives, they are our ancestors. And for more than a century, their descendants have been asking for a simple thing, to bring them home.”
He and the French Minister for Culture, Catherine Pégard, were speaking during the examination of a bill aimed at facilitating the restitution to their countries of origin of works of art looted during colonization. A text that does not deal with “an essential subject, the question of human remains kept in public collections, which are the subject of requests to return to the Overseas Territories”, explained Catherine Pégard.
