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I doubt I'll ever get to touch a kakapo, but we live in a part of New Zealand where kiwi releases happen every so often, and the kids (and bigger people) get to touch the kiwi as they are released into the wild(with radio trackers attached).
Their feathers are very unusual, not feathery at all but more like a fur in texture, quite unusual, and were also used to make cloaks etc.
We also have kiwi living in the surrounding bush and can hear their cries at night. A couple of years ago I found a kiwi egg lying on the ground, it from quite some time for my brain to register what a giant egg was doing. That resulted in quite a bit of administrative activity, eventually getting the egg to the department of conservation for them to analyze it's cause of demise.
Kiwi feathers feel a bit like stands of nylon - thick and fairly stiff.
As you say, it feels very unusual!
As a small example of what rarely happened in any British Mueseum in the past[1]:
> In addition to skills sharing, one of the key aims was to include culturally appropriate care in the conservation process. PMAG was already in the process of forming a memorandum of understanding with the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa) – so they were brought on board as the third partner of the project. Awhina Tamarapa became the Māori curatorial adviser on the team.
So, small baby steps.
Full feather cloaks are striking when fresh and worn, eg a full emu feather cloak [2]
German speakers are giggling over the headline (kakapo means poopoo butt)
Like Mr Poopy Butthole?
Previous discussion from a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32884191
There are only 252 kākāpō left.[1] Really seems like Critically Endangered Conservation Status should have more grades, as kākāpō is the same status as western gorilla with as many as 50K individuals and the vaquita estimated at less than 10 individuals.
>estimated at less than 10 individuals.
That seems more like "extinct, but hasn't yet admitted it" than endangered.
I'm pretty sure "Show image caption" is not part of the title …. (It's weird that the title deleted the content-ful, non-clickbait word 'known', but grabbed, I guess, an errant bit of HTML.)
Fixed now. Submitted title was "Caring for the only full kākāpō feather cloak in the world Show image caption"
They probably got the title from copying the visible heading on the page, which includes the "Show image caption" icon.
The removal of "known" is probably a result of "Caring for the only known full kākāpō feather cloak in the world Show image caption" being too long for an HN title.
The HN moderators' decision process is as bizarre as it is opaque, it's not worth trying to understand.
It's copy and paste -
"Caring for the only known full kākāpō feather cloak in the world
Show image caption"
Code -
<h1 id="paragraph-30476-title" class="hero__title hero__title--small"> Caring for the only known full kākāpō feather cloak in the world</h1>
....
<span class="visually-hidden">Show image caption</span>
Not changed by mods (yet) - https://hackernewstitles.netlify.app/
Hot taking coming...
This seems like utter nonsense?
The British museum can not make up for it's I'll gotten items by having some ceremonies for a cloak.
Perhaps I'm culturally ignorant. But if it wasn't for guilt why on Earth would they have ceremonies around a cloak? I suspect the Maori did not have ceremonies around their cloaks. But I guess the advisor has to show worth somehow.
Still won't make up for stolen bones of Africans that were grave robbed. Or the the proceeds of military conquests and out right pilthered items they have in the collection.
I'm far from an expert on Maori culture but central to their worldview is the concept of "mana", which is essentially spirit. Your own mana and that of your ancestors was incredibly important, and that mana could be imbued in items.
Exchanging gifts of mana was a big cultural/social tradition. It seems reasonable that a valuable and distinctive item like a feather cloack would have had a lot of significance and tradition surrounding it. That doesn't mean there were cloak specific prayers but I doubt the ceremonies were completely baseless.
When they talk about the ceremonies and personify the cape (which does sound a bit odd the way it's written in the article) I'm pretty sure it's referring to the spirit of the previous owners, and I'm not surprised that Maori with a traditional sense of spirituality would find a lot of religous importance in that.
Seems reasonably, but you are simply assuming it's culturally appropriate. We don't know for sure.
When we consider most cultures want their stuff back from rich countries museums and that is soundly ignored I suspect its a distraction.
Let me add to your hot take with my hotter take:
I think it's dumb to request the British museum to return priceless 'stolen' artifacts when they were mainly gained by digging through rubble and abandoned sites anyway. And the countries that are requesting these items back lack the stability to ensure their safety and preservation. Yes, even Egypt is unsafe. As evidenced by their revolution where the Egyptian National museum was robbed, some artifacts stolen, and ancient grave sites pilfered in the last decade. Suffice to say that this situation is much worse for a lot of African countries. Is it culturally appropriate to keep these items? No, not really. But when the alternative is possible destruction, I would rather they keep them and piss everyone off.
I do appreciate the view.
It is still theft however.
Last month I saw a child on the tube leave their weird tablet on the seat as their parent dragged them away.
Should I have kept the tablet? I'd have looked after it better than the child. Before they forgot about it they were mashing it pretty hard. They could break it despite the stupid case on the thing.
I hope you'd suggest give it back to them (don't worry I did - and am still bragging about it to strangers weeks later apparently).
The underlying ethics is the same imo. You shouldn't take stuff from others no matter how they are treating their stuff. It's theirs.
Timelines matter here. Nation states separated by centuries are different than a child on the tube. At a certain threshold things become human history and we should be able to rise above "Finders keepers"/"No it's Mine" arguments over artifacts and instead find the best stewards.
What gives us the right to tell Egyptians that they are not the best stewards for their antiquities?
Let's flip the narrative because I suspect you've spent too much time thinking about this problem only from one side.
And I know this is far fetched. Let's imagine the objects began vanishing and it became apparent an alien nation had taken them for safe keeping.
They say Earth is not safe for these objects, they know how to maintain them and inspect them better than humans can. These objects will be viewed by trillions of beings on distant planets next to other objects they safeguard from other planets. Planets we could never possibly visit maybe the Jeff Bezos' and Musk's of the world get to visit and look at these objects.
Would you say, oh I'm sure they know how to look after and appreciate those objects better than we do?
I suspect not and ultimately you may realise this is really the same old might is right ideology.
>What gives us the right to tell Egyptians that they are not the best stewards for their antiquities?
Well, for one, modern Egyptians have hardly anything in common with their ancient Egyptian-Pyramid-Building ancestors, even genetically they're fairly different since the Arab invasions...they profit off the tourism industry of these ruins, and the country actively has segments of the population that still considers them heresy and wants to destroy them. But the tourism brings in a LOT of money, so any valuable artifact is important. There's a large black market of stolen artifacts. Written Papyrus scrolls are illegally found and broken up into small pieces and sold as cheap kitch, making deciphering the original document impossible. Even to this day.
>And I know this is far fetched. Let's imagine the objects began vanishing and it became apparent an alien nation had taken them for safe keeping.
Their objects didn't "vanish". In your example, it would be like Aliens coming in and began digging through our piles of rubble that we long didn't give a shit about and found something valuable. Nothing was stolen. At worst, they came and conquered our lands and dominated us for 50 years, and still...they went digging through our rubble and found valuable shit that we didn't care about. We used the big rock piles of old buildings that the heretics built ages ago to build our homes, apparently there was more to it... even though in hindsight we probably damaged these precious relics in the process but let's not even get to that.
Suddenly, our old trash is valuable. Culturally, historically, we have little in common with this trash, but it's apparently valuable to someone else. They took it. Decades later we learn a lot more about these objects through these Aliens, and we understand why they are important to our history. We now want them back. And we are...acting entitled because we feel like they stole them from us? From our trash piles? It just sounds like sour grapes to me.
This is the situation we are in right now, at least with the example of Egypt.
Look up "Mummy Brown" to see just how much Egyptians gave a shit about Egyptian history and culture until the British came and gave it value. I don't discount that the educated metropolitan Egyptians legitimately care about these artifacts by the way, but there's still segments of the country that only see it as profiteering opportunities, and worse still, want to destroy them. I don't get the entitlement that they deserve these artifacts back. They didn't care about them until someone else found them and gave them value. All of a sudden it's now relevant again? After they told us why its important?
I think we disagree fundamentally about rights in this situation.
It's their objects and it'll never be ours.
We wouldn't let Egypt come into Britain unearth items and take them back to Egypt.
Ultimately that they couldn't stop us makes it okay for you.
For me that is just 'might is right'.
In the story above the kid neglected his tablet. That doesn't make it mine if I want it.
My nephew will often cry if I start playing with a toy despite him originally neglecting it.
I give him his toy. Because it's his.
If I found a childhood toy in a friend's backyard I wouldn't walk off with it. It's still his. Should he die it would belong to his estate.
When these objects were taken, most of the time laws were broken. No one questions this. Occasionally it was just bullied away. Sometimes it was just stolen.
People are still stealing objects from other countries. And it is wrong no matter how much they think they would value it more. [0]
It's telling that the British Museum doesn't address the elephant in the room: will they be returning the cloak to the Maori people?
If not, why not?
While it's laudible that they contribute conservation and reconstruction expertise to projects like this - they are well funded and this is in their mandate, after all - if the ultimate goal doesn't include a discussion of returning the cultural history to the people and places it was taken from, then this just more whitewashing of troubling colonial attitudes that continue to this day.
> It's telling that the British Museum doesn't address the elephant in the room: will they be returning the cloak to the Maori people?
Because they're not in possession of it, another museum is. They're just helping.
This isn't an artifact that was stolen, it was bought by or given freely to a doctor who donated it to the museum in the late 1800s.
All the greek and egyptian stuff should be returned though.
> who donated it to the museum
To a completely different museum in Scotland.
> will they be returning the cloak to the Maori people?
No, because it's not owned by the British Museum, but by the Perth Museum and Art Gallery.
Why haven't the Maori conserved the other ones?
They probably got used until they were worn out, while this one's been safe in storage. They weren't designed and made to be museum pieces, but to be worn (not for everyday purposes so much as ceremonially as a symbol of power and respect).
John Oliver did a segment on this recently. The British Museum is amazing, but you don't have to dig very deep or think very hard to find some very uncomfortable truths.
It's a very depressing topic.
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/oct/03/john-ol...