A century away: How 39 Naga ancestors are finally returning home

More than a century after they were drawn from the hills of northeast India, 39 Naga forefathers made their method home.

On November 9, the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum officially moved custodianship of 39 Naga ancestral human remains– mostly skulls– to agents of the Naga individuals.The remains, gathered throughout the British colonial duration, are now being gone back to Nagaland, where neighborhoods prepare to provide a dignified resting location in Kohima.The homecoming is the conclusion of a six-year, Naga-led effort to recuperate forefathers kept in Oxford. Why were the remains taken in the very first location, and why did a European museum hold on to them for so long?From colonial explorations to museum collectionsThe majority of the Naga stays were given Oxford in between approximately 1910 and 1940 by British colonial administrators and anthropologists John Henry Hutton and James Philip Mills.At the time, the collection of human remains was carefully connected to the emerging disciplines of sociology and racial science.Colonial authorities studied Indigenous neighborhoods, recorded their customizeds and gathered product that they thought might assist categorize and comprehend various populations. The Pitt Rivers Museum’s own account now acknowledges that this gathering did not constantly take place through totally free permission.Human remains and other things were “regularly taken throughout punitive military explorations, instead of easily provided,” the museum states. That difference is main to the Naga need for repatriation.The colonial administration’s relationship with Naga neighborhoods was itself formed by military explorations and resistance to British guideline. Things and human remains obtained throughout that duration for that reason can not just be deemed neutral clinical specimens.The museum’s account likewise records the participation of Mills and Hutton in colonial explorations and the method their administrative and anthropological functions overlapped.What ultimately entered into Oxford’s collection had, oftentimes, been drawn from a society living under colonial power.Why bring them back?For the Naga neighborhoods, these are not museum items. They are forefathers.The project for their return started in 2020, after Naga anthropologist Dolly Kikon approached the Pitt Rivers Museum.It turned into a more comprehensive procedure including the Forum for Naga Reconciliation, its Recover, Restore and Decolonise group, tribal bodies, senior citizens, churches and civil society groups.

“This is not simply a see for the Naga delegation. It is an act of recovery, of returning sovereign choice making and recovering the self-respect of our forefathers and the Naga individuals.”

DOLLY KIKON, NAGA ANTHROPOLOGIST

The aim was not simply to remove human remains from a museum collection, but to determine collectively what their return should mean.

“This is not just a visit for the Naga delegation. It is an act of healing, of returning sovereign decision making and reclaiming the dignity of our ancestors and the Naga people,” Kikon said in the museum’s account of the repatriation.

Another Naga representative, Thejao Vihienuo, questioned the premise behind the original acquisition: “I suspect that nobody would have given the skull of his father or his grandfather as a gift to another person.”

The Naga communities want their ancestors back because they believe the dead should be cared for according to their own cultural traditions and not preserved indefinitely in a foreign institution.

The Naga-Oxford Declaration on Repatriation describes the process as one of healing and restoring dignity.

The remains will ultimately be placed in a joint memorial resting place in Kohima, intended as a place of healing and peace.

Oxford is not alone

The Naga homecoming is part of a much wider reckoning over Indigenous ancestral remains held by museums and universities around the world.

For decades, indigenous communities in countries including Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US have sought the return of human remains taken during colonial expansion.

The Pitt Rivers Museum itself has returned ancestral remains to Indigenous communities in Australia, Canada, the US and New Zealand.

Australia has seen one of the largest international repatriation efforts. The Australian government says it has supported the return of more than 1,700 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ancestors from overseas over more than three decades.

In the US, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act provides a legal framework for returning certain Native American human remains and cultural objects to tribes and descendants.

More than a return of bones

For much of the colonial era, British officials and European scholars collected, classified and interpreted Naga culture. Museums then became repositories not only of Naga objects, but of the colonial knowledge produced around them. Repatriation challenges that system.

The Pitt Rivers Museum eliminated human remains from screen in 2020 and has actually considering that established a more community-led technique to repatriation. In the Naga case, the procedure has actually included neighborhoods in figuring out how the forefathers need to be gotten and kept in mind.