Oxford Museum Returns 39 Colonial-Era Human Remains To Naga People In India
The Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University has returned the remains of 39 Naga people to representatives from India. This action is part of a growing global movement among museums to repatriate human remains acquired during the colonial era.
Why it matters
It highlights the ongoing ethical debate regarding colonial-era artifacts and the push for cultural restitution by Indigenous communities.
An Oxford University museum on Monday returned the remains of 39 people taken during Britain's colonial rule in India to members of its Naga community.Almost 30 people from the community based in northeastern Nagaland, a mountainous state bordering Myanmar, travelled to Britain for the ceremony, which the museum's director, Laura Van Broekhoven, called a "historic moment".The handover at the Pitt Rivers Museum came as part of a broader trend among Western museums reassessing how they acquired exhibits from other cultures, particularly human remains, and in some cases returning them.The Pitt Rivers, an ethnographic museum founded in the 19th century, has already handed back human remains to Indigenous communities in Australia, New Zealand and the United States.The Oxford museum has more than 6,000 objects representing Naga culture, the largest collection in the world, and is giving back "ancestral human remains", mainly skulls, to the Naga people. Van Broekhoven hailed it as "a…
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