As I pass the 40-year mark of work in cultural heritage and cultural heritage law, I am grateful for the opportunity to reflect on how the field has evolved since the mid-1980s. This reflection acknowledges the contributions of those who influenced the early development of this field and the way their work continues today through the scholarship and activism of their successors. Evolution on the international level was matched with domestic legal accomplishments in the United States—the world’s largest art market—with conclusive recognition of the principle of foreign state ownership to protect archaeological heritage, US ratification of the 1954 Hague Convention, and an expansion of US implementation of the 1970 UNESCO Convention. At the same time, threats to cultural heritage from armed conflict, other forms of violence, and climate-change-induced natural disasters continue, while the field has only started to reckon with the legacies of colonialism and imperialism often embodied in the large public collections in the European former colonial powers and those who purchased cultural objects from them. This article sets out four areas of cultural heritage law in which we have not succeeded sufficiently and the questions that remain for future generations to resolve.

This article analyses the administrative structure and development of Chile's indigenous policies under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973–90), taking as its focus a pilot project for indigenous Mapuche integration known as Plan Perquenco. Officials formulated Plan Perquenco in accordance with the Chilean state's new administrative structure known as regionalisation. I focus on the unintended consequences of regionalisation that permitted the Mapuche youth group, Los Guitarreros Caminantes, to work through Plan Perquenco's music programmes to challenge the cultural politics of and justification for the pilot project.