Recommendation 1: #ReturnOurAncestors! The Canadian Museum Association and its partner institutions must uphold its responsibilities to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommendations, and the promises they made to the AFN, to digitize and make private archives and holdings accessible for transparency. In no uncertain terms, museums must repatriate the bodies of Indigenous ancestors. There needs to be immediate expert and Indigenous-led audits of collections to assess what exists in collections; the primary goal being to find sensitive materials such as bodies, which museologists quietly know to exist within many of Canada’s major institutions.

Recommendation 4: Always centre care, capacity, realistic timeframes, and meaningful responses when addressing the concerns of Indigenous employees, and only request those perspectives with the expressed consent of employees.

• Make culturally sensitive supports available to employees. Take every claim of harm seriously, and centre genuine concern towards healing and mediating those facets of the institutional culture. Never gaslight employees.
• Always consult from within as opposed to without the organization, putting less focus on tokenistic measures such as business consultants and more focus on the integration of anti-racist structures and cultures, and Black and Indigenous decolonial ideologies and peoples throughout workplaces.

Recommendation 14: Restitution should be embedded in fee structures. Indigenous artists should receive higher resale fees, especially communities that have been historically exploited by the market (such as Inuit). Regardless of industry standards, Black and Indigenous artists should receive fees for showing in private and commercial galleries.

Recommendation 16: For the foreseeable future, the acquisitions budget of Canadian art institutions must be solely dedicated to the acquisition of Black and Indigenous art. This acquisition campaign must not be merely history art about Indigenous and Black peoples; even if this means collecting primarily contemporary artists.

Recommendation 17: The executive, governing and advisory boards of cultural institutions in Canada must restructure to include diverse members of Black and Indigenous communities.

Recommendation 19: Canada needs to develop its own federal, provincial and territorial repatriation legislation, drawing from the shortcomings of NAGPRA and led by communities of Indigenous artists, curators, cultural administrators, Elders, and other respected Indigenous cultural leaders within Reserve and urban communities. While it must foremost be concerned with “human remains,” this legislation should expand the notion of repatriation beyond bodies to funerary objects, “sacred” objects, and objects of cultural patrimony. These laws must be meaningfully co-developed in collaboration with Indigenous peoples.

• These “Repatriation Acts” must be passed in every province and territory within the borders of Canada, and not simply apply to federal reserve lands.
• The legislation must have extremely strong compliance measures, with an accountability provision that allows Indigenous representatives to ensure the legislation is being enforced. As Indigenous people are not flora and fauna, Parks Canada should not be involved in the implementation of the legislation. Jurisdiction over “Repatriation Acts” could fall under the Canadian Heritage Portfolio or even the Minister of Justice.

Recommendation 20: Indigenous peoples should have cultural sovereignty over the management of their arts and cultures in Canada.

• In addition to legislation, federal, provincial and territorial governments should work to support the creation of a network of northern, reserve-based, and urban Indigenous cultural communities that could support a self-determined infrastructure for the direct funding of Indigenous artist-run centres and spaces nationwide. This network should build upon the work of cultural communities already on the ground and doing the work.