"A Universe of Stolen Things": Indigenous Rematriation Fictions and Museum Biocolonialism

This article discusses a series of Indigenous literary and film texts that I term “rematriation fictions”: texts that feature museums holding Indigenous remains or sacred treasures and are concerned with the politics and ethics of repatriation. Grounded in Indigenous legal, ethical and ontological frameworks, these “rematriation fictions” prioritize the restoration of rightful relationships over official repatriation protocols. None of the texts represents an act of official repatriation; instead, they imagine alternative and improvised ceremonies of return or guardianship, escapes, and subversive or illegal gestures of rescue. I put these texts in dialogue with Indigenous critiques of biocolonialism – the extraction and theft of Indigenous genetic “data” in scientific research practices – to highlight the continuities they identify between the treatment of Indigenous bones and treasures in museums and the treatment of Indigenous blood samples and DNA in laboratories. I analyze biocolonial critique and subversive acts of rematriation in Cherokee novelist Thomas King’s Truth and Bright Water (1999) and the concept of mana tuturu (spiritual guardianship) in Māori filmmaker Barry Barclay’s Te Rua (1991), arguing that these 1990s texts offer prescient critiques of museum practices in a decade of intense biocolonial activity and anticipate later Indigenous rematriation frameworks.