From Scotland to Canada, a totem pole finally returns home

After almost a century and a journey of thousands of miles, an artefact taken from Canada is now home. It is the first totem pole to be returned from a British museum to an indigenous community - a potentially precedent-setting moment in the broader move towards museum repatriation.

Museum curator Marius Barbeau had been eyeing the totem pole for some time.

It was the late 1920s, and the Canadian ethnographer had paid many visits to the Ank'idaa village in the Nass Valley, an indigenous community nestled between picturesque mountains, creeks and waterfalls in a remote part of British Columbia (BC).