THEY have rarely been on display in the 150 years since being parted from their owners and are languishing in the storerooms of Scottish museums.
Now a group of native Canadian Indians are to wage a new transatlantic battle to take home sacred 'false face' masks and rattles that were taken from their ancestors by Victorian collectors.
The repatriation claims will be filed later this year f
or at least three artefacts held by the National Museums of Scotland (NMS) in Edinburgh and Glasgow City Council.
The masks and rattles were among 100 items viewed by a delegation from the Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Cultures (Grasac) which visited Scotland last December.
The group took three years to raise the money to make the journey to identify the objects. The requests are expected from the Confederacy Council of the Haudenosaunee, meaning 'people of the Long House' and also known as Iroquois or Six Nations.
None of the spiritual items are on display and they represent just a fraction of the thousands of artefacts from indigenous cultures around the globe.
If the Haudenosaunee request is granted, the masks and rattles will join a list of other native artefacts repatriated recently - such as a 'ghost' shirt at the Kelvingrove in Glasgow and shrunken Maori heads at Marischal Hall in Aberdeen that were returned to the US and New Zealand respectively.
Keith Jamieson, a historian and Grasac member living in the Six Nations of the Grand River community near Brantford, Ontario, said: "Repatriation requests will be made this year. We are looking at a set of strategies to appease all sides so we are happy and the Canadian and UK governments are happy. We want to start the process.
"We are still here, we are still alive and well, and we no longer want to be a subject for study."
Wooden false face masks are considered deeply spiritual and very unique to the individual who created them. Carved from trees and often adorned with hair and brass eyelets, they were used in medicinal rituals.
They are so sacred to the Haudenosaunee that the tribe's council has decreed they should never be put on public display, sold or photographed and that efforts should be made to retrieve those that have found their way to museums worldwide.
Jamieson said the masks and rattles - used to make music at festivals - were "extremely valuable" to his people.
"Representing our communities in Scotland was very humbling and working with the museums is a delicate balancing act," he said. "We have not seen this stuff in 150 years and we don't want to see another 150 years go by."
There are more than 16,500 Canadian native objects in 23 UK museums, including 31 human remains and 182 'grave goods'.
More than 3,100 of those are in Scotland's main collections, with many brought back or donated by Victorian collectors. Many Scots worked among the native communities in the 18th and 19th centuries, and many objects were taken when traditional practices were made illegal or taboo by the Canadian government.
NMS is believed to have at least one face mask, while Glasgow City Council, which runs the newly refurbished Kelvingrove, is believed to have a rattle.
Glasgow officials are also currently trying to find the origins of a Canadian skull, which at one time was on display in the city.
Perth Museum and Art Gallery also has a "complete scalp" in its collection whose provenance is unknown.
New British laws allow the return of human remains, but there is no legal basis for repatriation of other objects.
Dr Sally-Anne Coupar, curator at Glasgow University's Hunterian Museum, which was also visited by the delegation, said: "We recognise the importance of working with tribal members and trying to build a sense of trust across cultures, proving to them that the objects are being properly cared for with the necessary respect."
A spokesman for Glasgow City Council said it could not comment until a repatriation request was received.
A spokeswoman for NMS added: "We have had no formal repatriation request from the Haudenosaunee as yet, although we would treat any requests on a case-by-case basis."
Carvings of the spirit world
The False Face Society is the best known of many medicinal societies among the Iroquois. The masks are used in healing rituals which invoke spirits and a dream world. Those cured by the society become members.
Iroquois traditionalists object to labelling the 'false faces' as masks since they are not objects but the living representation of spirits. Most have long black or white horse hair and crooked noses.
When making them, an Iroquois walks through the woods until he is moved by a spirit to carve a mask from a tree. The masks are carved directly on the tree and only removed when completed. Masks are painted red if they were begun in the morning or black if they were begun in the afternoon. Red masks are thought to be more powerful. Masks with both colours represent spirits with 'divided bodies'.
