My uncle, Jim Moriarty, the youngest of seven kids, sometimes stopped by the Gourlay house on his way home from elementary school in the early 1960s. He would sit in the living room of the old Calgary bungalow, next to the handsome grandfather clock, where Gretchen Gourlay, known to my family as “cousin Gay,” provided occasional after-school supervision. She would serve Jim cake and then send him home, a few short blocks away, with fresh bread. She would tell him no end of stories, like the one about how the clock was haunted by a leprechaun.
And every so often she would let Jim hold a shrunken head.
My uncle, now in his 60s, told me it was one of the most unusual things he had ever seen and touched in his life. He described the leathery texture, the tiny ears. The mouth that was sewn together. The same proportions as a normal head—just smaller. The Gourlays called it Snowball because it fit in the palm of your hand like a well-packed ball of snow. “Cousin Gay was a very interesting person. It was special going there. She really treated me well,” he said. Gretchen was in her early 70s at the time. Her husband, Robert, had died several years before, and she lived alone. Jim thinks she also appreciated his visits. “She enjoyed my company, and I enjoyed her company. It was just one of those things that worked out,” he said.
Jim sent me a photo of an old newspaper clipping that announced Gretchen’s donation of the shrunken head to the Glenbow Museum in late 1970. “The unique object was recently donated by Mrs. Robert Gourlay, whose husband purchased the head in Ecuador 14 years ago,” the article read. I found another Calgary Herald piece about an exhibit from February 1971 called “One Hundred” that was designed to showcase the variety of material collected by the museum the previous year. It said, “From more distant sources come a shrunken head from Ecuador and a sealskin and ivory chess set from Pelly Bay, NWT.”
But then the trail went cold. No record of any exhibits for decades. I wondered if the shrunken head was still at the museum, tucked away in a storage drawer. And if it was still at the Glenbow, then maybe I could go and see it.
The cultural tradition of head shrinking goes back to at least the 16th century, according to anthropologist and author Frances Larson in Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found. The Shuar, an Indigenous group who live along the border between Ecuador and Peru, would raid neighbouring tribes, such as the Achuar, and take their heads. They shrank them by removing the skull and all the flesh from the skin and then filling the skin with hot rocks and sand until it was reduced to the size of a large orange. The lips and eyes were sewn shut. “These practicalities served to harness the extraordinary power of their victim’s soul and were part of complex ceremonies that lasted many years,” Larson writes. That power was often transferred, via a series of celebratory feasts, to women in the community as a way of ensuring plentiful food for their households.
Europeans arrived in Ecuador and Peru in the late 19th century to harvest rubber and cinchona bark, the source for the active ingredient in quinine, an anti-malarial drug. Larson describes how these foreigners were enthralled by shrunken heads, also known as tsantsas, and traded with the Shuar to get them. The price became one gun for one shrunken head. “Guns were used to take heads, which were, in turn, exchanged for more guns,” Larson writes. The ceremonial significance of tsantsas was overshadowed by their sudden rise in commercial value. They became a commodity, and people created forgeries to satisfy the demand. People shrank monkey and sloth heads, or made them from goatskin, wood, resin and rubber. Larson describes how taxidermists created fake tsantsas out of real heads, using unclaimed or sometimes stolen bodies from morgues—although this source for the counterfeit heads has more recently been disputed because there is little evidence to prove it.
The museum world has an old saying that a museum without a mummy is not a museum. It represents an outdated vision for the purpose of the institution, one rooted in the project of colonialism. But that same sort of mentality applied to shrunken heads in the 19th and 20th centuries. They ended up in the collections of museums across the western world. The government of Ecuador passed laws forbidding the manufacture and trade of tsantsas, but many were still sold into the late 1900s. It’s estimated that between 80 and 90 per cent of the shrunken heads in museum collections around the world are fake, meaning they were created to sell and not for ceremonial use.
As it turned out, the tsantsa at the Glenbow was not in a drawer but rather in a cabinet, on the sixth floor. And it was under lock and key alongside, you guessed it, another shrunken head. Cynthia Chang-Christison, the museum’s director of external relations, was quick to deflate any hope I had of visiting the museum and seeing the tsantsa my uncle had held as a child. “Glenbow made the decision decades ago that this type of material would not be made available for public viewing,” she wrote in an email in late June.
I met with several staff from the Glenbow, including Daryl Betenia, the director of collections, a couple weeks later at a coffee shop across the pedestrian mall from the museum, which is in the midst of a multi-year, roughly $130-million renovation. The old precast concrete panels had been stripped from the sides of the eight-storey building and the opening for a new entrance was cut into the northeast corner. Betenia told me the other tsantsa had been purchased in 1968 as part of a larger acquisition from the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC. A student from the University of Calgary studied the two shrunken heads in the Glenbow’s collection in the mid ’90s. “Her conclusion in the end was that the Gourlay one is likely authentic, and the other one is likely not,” Betenia said. The next step for the tsantsas, she explained, would be to try and repatriate them to their communities of origin. Giving something back, however, is sometimes not as easy as it sounds.
The director of Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University, Laura Van Broekhoven, told me she knew of 172 tsantsas in museums in Europe, the United States and the UK that are stuck in a similar kind of limbo as the two at the Glenbow. “They’re all just sort of lying in storage,” she said during a call in early July. Staff at Pitt Rivers are tracking down the number and location of tsantsas in museums worldwide, and Van Broekhoven suspects they will be adding many more to their list. But then there are also the more commercial interests, venues such as Ripley’s Believe It or Not, which claims on its website to have more than 100 genuine shrunken heads. One expert I spoke to estimated that the total number of ceremonial tsantsas worldwide, in both public and private collections, would be somewhere in the hundreds.
Van Broekhoven is part of an international group of researchers working with representatives of the Shuar people to figure out what the next chapter might look like for shrunken heads. The Tsantsas Project started in 2017 and includes participants from the Universidad de San Francisco de Quito (USFQ), the Pumapungo museum, and the National Institute of Cultural Heritage of Ecuador. Their goal is not only to help the Shuar and Achuar reclaim their cultural heritage but to give them a chance to tell a more nuanced and accurate story about who they are and why their ancestors engaged in the ritual of head shrinking.
The researchers have organized several workshops and consultations with delegates from Shuar communities since 2017. Van Broekhoven wrote about the Tsantsas Project in the Routledge Handbook of Museums, Heritage and Death in 2024 in an article that includes comments and perspectives from the Shuar. “We don’t have anything against the world knowing our world, and for museums to have our souvenirs and talk about our cosmovision, our ways of living here. What we ask is that museums involve us Shuar so that it can be us who tell the stories, and we can show the world all our instruments and aspects of our attire, the tsantsas,” said Jefferson Acacho, a leader of the Shuar federation in Zamora, at a workshop in 2022.
The team of researchers signed a memorandum of understanding with five of the Shuar federations, representing about 200,000 people, in April of 2023. The agreement grants the institutions involved in the Tsantsas Project the ability to represent the Shuar when communicating with other museums about their cultural heritage.
The mapping project by staff at Pitt Rivers, finding out the number and location of tsantsas worldwide, is ongoing. Another important step is to figure out a reliable and efficient way to determine whether a head is a fake. Andrew Nelson, a professor and department chair of anthropology at Western University in Ontario, has been working on a series of research papers testing different scanning technologies on shrunken heads. He used a micro-computed tomography scanner to study a tsantsa from the Chatham–Kent museum in southern Ontario. He determined it was made from human remains, but likely not for ceremonial use. The modern thread and precise stitchwork to sew eyes and lips and the incision on the back of the head were clues that it was counterfeit.
He is working on another paper about using a dental scanner, which is less expensive and easier to find than a micro-CT scanner. Both machines can determine whether the tsantsa is made from human remains, but it will take a large sample of scans to determine a reliable method for distinguishing the shrunken heads that are human but fake from the ones that are human and created for ceremonial use.
The Pitt Rivers museum has 10 tsantsas in storage: six human, two sloth and two made from monkey remains. Four of them had been part of a display cabinet called “Treatment of Dead Enemies,” which had been one of the museum’s biggest draws since it was created in the 1940s right up until it was removed in 2020. In fact, Pitt Rivers was sometimes referred to as the “shrunken head museum” in guidebooks and the media. The overhaul of the exhibits in 2020 included the removal of more than 100 other human remains, including skulls, scalps and mummies.
Tsantsas in museums are stuck in limbo, just lying in storage, until the Shuar and Achuar can tell a more accurate story.
Van Broekhoven told me the decision was a long time coming. The displays were in contravention of a national government policy for the care of human remains in museums. The museum’s internal audience research had indicated that regardless of the context that curators provided alongside the tsantsas, many visitors continued to interpret the display in ways that reinforced stereotypes instead of deepening their understanding about another way of life. Larson writes about how the display of severed heads in museums exemplified a story that people in the West used to enjoy telling, about so-called primitive people living in remote and exotic places. The glass display case offered a tidy distinction between civilization and savagery.
Larson was working at the Pitt Rivers museum when she started thinking about writing a book about disembodied heads. She observed how visitors invariably got the impression from the display of tsantsas that headhunting was something done in the distant past in far-off lands. She explores in her book how severed heads have long had a place in western society. Medical students dissect them; religious people travel to see the heads of saints displayed in churches all over Europe; artists visit morgues to study them; and people ask to have their heads removed after death so they can be cryogenically preserved. Larson wrote Severed to try to answer the question “What can we learn about our common humanity from this, the ultimate image of inhumanity?”
The anthropologist also charts the different connections between colonialism, museums and human remains. “The 19th century saw a massive increase in the number of human remains housed in museums as archaeologists, medics and anthropologists, eager to ground their theories in solid evidence, went out in search of more and more data,” she writes. One of the theories that scientists tried to prove by measuring and cataloguing the bodies and bones of people from other cultures was the racist notion of white superiority. By the turn of the 21st century, more than 100,000 human remains were held in British cultural institutions, and likely more than 200,000 Native American human remains were held in federally sponsored US institutions. Larson observes, “It is a truly colossal inheritance.”
The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act [NAGPRA] was passed in the United States in 1990 and recognizes that the human remains, as well as other forms of cultural heritage, of Indigenous people should be returned to their communities of origin. ProPublica published a series of articles in 2023 that outlined how some American museums and universities continue to resist and delay the return of this type of material. The US Department of the Interior announced changes to NAGPRA in late 2023 to streamline the process and make it easier for people to get the remains of their relatives back from museums. Canada has no such federal legislation about repatriation. It’s up to each institution to decide whether and how to return this type of material.
Van Broekhoven told me that giving something back can be straightforward, but the situation with the tsantsas is more complex. Any request for the return of a tsantsa from Pitt Rivers would need to include an agreement from both the Shuar and the Achuar, which so far has not come to fruition. Some institutions have returned shrunken heads to Ecuador, but Van Broekhoven said there is no guarantee that the government will then engage with the Indigenous communities. She emphasized the importance of patience, and of building relationships, to carrying out a responsible repatriation, “so that it actually helps build unity, peace, real redress and reconciliation in the community.”
The staff at the Glenbow explained how they see this type of engagement as part of their responsibilities as museum professionals. People who run museums have shifted to seeing themselves as stewards, instead of owners, of the collection. The renovation project at the Glenbow includes new spaces for holding ceremonies and hosting people who want to visit and study what’s on display and in storage.
This more open and collaborative approach to running a museum often yields valuable new information and insights. Van Broekhoven described how they have learned more about the shrunken heads in the last few years by working with the Shuar than had been learned during the entire eight decades they were on display. For example, all the academic literature about tsantsas claimed the heads were only taken during raids. The Shuar delegates told the research team that the ritual of head shrinking was also done as way to honour leaders of the community, both men and women.
I had managed to track down Gretchen Gourlay’s granddaughter in the fall of 2023. Liz Gibbs was 68 and a retired nurse. She lived in the same house that my uncle Jim used to visit after school. The same clock in the corner of the living room still chimed to announce the turn of each hour. Gibbs told me all about her grandfather. Robert Gourlay was a land surveyor with a keen sense of adventure. She called him a “wild Scotsman” and showed me a series of letters he had mailed home to his family in Canada while travelling in Ecuador and Peru in 1956, the trip on which he had bought the shrunken head.
Gibbs showed me a black-and-white photo of the tsantsa and the sturdy wooden box it had been kept in, one of Robert’s cases for his surveying instruments. The mouth was sewn with a thick, straw-like fibre that was looped around a set of three short pegs. The thread for the eyes was finer and hard to discern. The dark hair was cut short. I felt myself slow down as I absorbed what I was seeing. Even a photograph of the tsantsa exerted a kind of gravitational pull.
Frances Larson wrote about how a severed head, regardless of its origin or even the context in which we encounter it, hits us on a gut level. Discrete circuits in our brains have evolved to recognize and interpret facial expressions. “When it is the face of a bodiless head, our physical reflex—that instinctive empathy—conflicts with the knowledge that this person must be dead,” she wrote. It’s a powerful type of memento mori, a reminder of our mortality.
The experience is unsettling, whether we’re in a museum or a morgue or a living room, because we intuit that the head is somehow both an object and a person. “It presents an apparently impossible duality,” Larson writes. But that enigmatic quality is what allows this type of human remains to travel through time and mean different things to different people. “It can be an item of trade, a communication aid, a political pawn or a family heirloom; and it can be many of these things at once,” she writes.
My uncle Jim never mentioned feeling scared as a kid when seeing and handling the shrunken head. But he talked about the experience, so many decades later, in hushed tones. He described how some of Gretchen’s stories had seemed far-fetched, but then she actually had a shrunken head, which lent everything else she told him more credence. The tsantsa had suggested to my uncle that the world was a bigger and more mysterious place than he had ever imagined. It had also played a part in the unlikely friendship that developed between him and Gretchen, a 7-year-old and a 70-year-old enjoying each other’s company on those weekday afternoons all those years ago.
Doug Horner’s first book is Back from the Deep (Steerforth Press, 2024). He is a former departments editor with Alberta Views.
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