Indian tribes want to return the skulls of ancestors from Great Britain — there they wanted to sell them at auction.
This is reported by the BBC.
Last month, British antiques center The Swan at Tetsworth put up for sale a horned skull of a member of the 19th-century Naga tribe from the northeastern Indian state of Nagaland.
"It was shocking to see people still auctioning the remains of our ancestors in the 21st century," said a member of the Naga Reconciliation Forum.
Scientists and tribal representatives protested the sale. The chief minister of the Indian state of Nagaland wrote a letter to Indiaʼs Ministry of External Affairs, describing the incident as "dehumanizing" and "a continuation of colonial violence against our people". The auction house then canceled the sale.
Scientists suggest that some of these human remains were objects of exchange or gifts, but some may have been exported, embodying colonial policies, that is, without the permission of the peoples.
A researcher of the culture of the Naga tribe Alok Kumar Kanungo believes that about 50 000 such objects are kept in public museums and private collections in Great Britain alone.
For example, Oxford Universityʼs Pitt Rivers Museum, which has the largest collection of the Naga people, has approximately 6 550 exhibits, including 41 human remains. The museum also has human remains from several other states of British India.
But in recent years, collectors have begun to rethink this approach. Thus, museums began to return human remains from communities such as the Maori tribes in New Zealand, warriors from Taiwan, Australian aborigines and native Hawaiians.
In 2019, the Pitt Rivers Museum returned 22 such objects, and this number has now increased to 35.
For ethical reasons, in 2020 the museum removed the Naga skulls from public display and placed them in storage.
The museum said it has yet to receive a formal claim from Naga descendants, and the process of returning the human remains could take anywhere from 18 months to several years, depending on the complexity of the case.
For repatriation, the Naga Forum formed a group called Revival, Restoration and Decolonization under the leadership of anthropologists Dolly Kikon and Arkotong Longkumer.
The team studies various documents to understand how certain remains ended up in various private and museum collections, because their return is a complex international and legal process.
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