Abstract

This undated photo shows Johan Adrian Jacobsen (1853–1947), a Norwegian ethnographer and explorer who acted as a recruiter for Carl Hagenbeck’s Völkerschauen, including the one exhibiting two Inuit families from Labrador in 1880–81, which tragically ended in the deaths of all the Inuit who were on display. Jacobsen was subsequently hired by the Berlin Ethnological Museum to collect cultural artefacts from the indigenous peoples living on the Northwest coast of North America. In some cases, he traded for objects, but he also dug up graves to take remains and burial objects without consent. Today, many of the objects thus stolen have been returned and the work of locating and repatriating illegally removed objects from European museums continues.