A group of Indigenous advocates are calling on anyone and everyone to help secure a large collection of Indigenous artifacts and return them to North America from overseas. Their biggest obstacle, overcoming an enormous price tag. “If anybody is watching this and you have deep pockets, and you have $14.5 million Canadian laying around, please reach out to us,” said Coleen Rajotte, executive director and project lead of the Return The Sacred organization. That’s how much advocates from the group believe it will cost to bring home a collection of 3,000 artifacts currently housed at a former museum and warehouse in Switzerland by a private collector. That doesn’t include an extra $3 million in contingency money potentially needed for their return. “(It’s) likely one of the largest private collections of sacred and Indigenous belongings in the world,” Rajotte said. Since CTV News last spoke with the team in June, they’ve met with the 70-year-old collector this month in Switzerland near Zurich. Vincent Escriba, the now 70-year-old collector, ran the Indian Land Museum in Gossau, Switzerland. In June, their original estimated price tag was closer to $20 million. This month, they photographed every single item in the owner’s catalogue that originates from First Nations across Canada and the United States. The collector told the group he amassed his collection from visiting North America as many as 50 times with an interest in Western and Indigenous cultures and purchasing other people’s private collections. “I was the first Indigenous person to visit with these items and that was so overwhelming; I had to take a moment,” Rajotte said on Friday. Some of the pieces are nearly two centuries old from a time where borders were not defined. “Manitoba was just a postage-size province in 1871,” said Gerald Neufeld, senior repatriation advisor for Return The Sacred. “A lot of these items come here before then. There was an imaginary boundary at the 49th parallel, but these people, they’re very migratory.” Neufeld, a history buff, was approached in December 2024 by Indigenous leadership with the idea of approaching the Swiss collector. Given the magnitude of the collection, the team would like to one day open a museum in Winnipeg to have these items on display here. The group believes there is a significant educational opportunity to have these pieces on display and also would contribute to the spirit of truth and reconciliation. “In our culture and our way of life, we don’t believe there’s a price tag on anything that is sacred,” said Karl Stone, a spiritual advisor for the team and member of Dakota Tipi First Nation. Rajotte said the next steps are translating every item entry from German to English. A fundraiser will be held in December, and the group is presenting a funding pitch to the Assembly of First Nations in Ottawa. They fear if they can’t buy the items within the next year, the owner will sell the collection elsewhere or as individual items. “These items will spend another 100 years in some big office tower far away from their people,” Rajotte said. Anyone interested in helping the team translate and catalogue items or help financially is encouraged to get in touch with the group.
