Native American Hopi go to court to stop Paris tribal art auction

A tribal people’s advocacy group has filed a court action in Paris to stop an auction of sacred objects from Arizona’s Hopi tribe planned for Friday.

© Antoine Mercier/Dan Graphiste

London-based Survival International, which lobbies for the interests of tribal people all over the world, has secured a court hearing for Thursday morning, which will be attended by the auctioneers.

The Neret-Minet auction house plan to sell about 70 masks used by the Hopi in their Katcina rituals.

Members of the Hopi tribe say they are sacred objects, and should never have left the tribe. Neret-Minet says the items were acquired legally by a French collector who spent 30 years in the United States.

Pierre Servan-Schreiber, a Paris-based partner of the law firm Skadden Arps, has taken the case pro bono and will ask the French judge to postpone the sale indefinitely.

"I’m going to tell the judge that he needs to suspend this sale, because there are too many questions that cannot be answered before tomorrow." he told RFI.

"Where do these masks come from? How, when, by whom were they purchased? And why are they being sold today?"

Servan-Schreiber wants to know how the masks were purchased and exported from the United States to be sure that no US laws or international conventions have been violated.

"All we are asking is for the sale not to proceed, because one thing is certain: if the sale goes through, it will be impossible to retrieve those masks," he said on Wednesday.

Citing a French law that has prevented the sale of tombs or tombstones in the past, Servan-Schreiber claims that "these masks are not just artifacts". 

"These masks are instruments through which, in the Hopi culture, the living communicate with the spirits of the ancestors," he insists.

"So they have an extraordinarily important value for the Hopi and their culture. And, by definition, and by law, these masks do not belong to anyone. They belong to the tribe. Therefore, they cannot be sold."