Doctor Tarisi Vunidilo has emerged as a leading voice in the growing movement across the Pacific in recent years to repatriate Pacific treasures, as well as human remains from museums across Europe and other parts of the world.
“Indigenous groups around the world [want] the repatriation of their cultural objects, funerary materials and human remains taken away with or without their ancestors’ consent, as a way of reasserting their cultural rights and in rediscovery of their roots and identity,” she said.
Vunidilo is a Fiji-born archaeologist and curator who specialises in indigenous museology and heritage management, and has been Assistant Professor of Archaeology at the University of Hawaii since 2018.
In an online seminar for the Association of Social Anthropology in Oceania, Vunidilo and other speakers from around the world discussed repatriation work they had been involved in with their own indigenous communities.
At conflict
Vunidilo said that because museums are concerned with acquiring artefacts and human remains for ethnographic and scientific research, and ensuring their preservation, repatriation may appear to conflict with their founding principles.
However, many anthropologists recognise the rights of indigenous people over their cultural heritage.
The seminar examined the issue of ownership and cultural property rights relating to the appropriation of Pacific cultural artefacts and human remains now housed in international metropolitan museums.
Fracesco Lattanzi from the University of Rome in Italy, spoke about the remains of a Kanak chief being brought back to New Caledonia from France in 2014.
Ataï was beheaded in the 1878 uprising against French colonial rule and for more than 100 years, his preserved head was either displayed or studied in several French museums, eventually arriving at the French National Museum of Natural History. In 2014, France repatriated Ataï’s skull to New Caledonia, along with the remains of his companion, Andja, in what has been described as “an act of great political and cultural significance”.
Lattanzi said that in 2015, after a year of mourning as required by the Kanak, the return of the two ancestors’ remains was celebrated by the grand chief of the Petit Couli tribe, Berger Kawa, initiator of the repatriation process, to whom the relics had been delivered. Through the method of ethnohistory (which combines the approaches of history, cultural anthropology, and archaeology), and thanks to ethnography (a branch of anthropology involving the systematic study of individual cultures), it was possible to delve into the historical interpretations around Ataï, his return process, and the ties to French colonialism.
The New Zealand government’s Karanga Aotearoa program negotiates the repatriation of Māori and Moriori ancestral remains on behalf of Māori and Moriori (the indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand’s Chatham Islands).
Between 1769 and the 1970s, at least 1200 Māori and Moriori human remains were spirited away from their homelands to private collectors, museums, and institutions overseas.
In 2003, the Karanga Aotearoa repatriation program of the Museum of New Zealand began the process of returning over 850 kōiwi tangata (Māori skeletal remains), kōimi tchakat (Moriori ancestral remains) and Toi moko (ancestral mummified heads).
These remains have come from museums in Switzerland, Germany, England, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Austria, France, the United States, Canada, Scotland, and Australia, among other places.
Meanwhile, McMichael Mutok Jr. registrar with Palau’s Bureau of Cultural and Historical Preservation, told the seminar about the collection of Palauan ancestral remains taken to Germany during Germany’s control of Palau from 1899 to 1914.
Last month, the University of Göttingen and the State Ethnographic Collections of Saxony in Germany repatriated the human remains of 10 individuals to Palau. The remains originated from the Hamburg South Seas Expedition (1908-1910) conducted by the then-Museum of Ethnology in Hamburg. Ethnologist Paul Hambruch collected the remains during a 1909 visit to Palau.
At the handing over ceremony, University of Göttingen President, Professor Metin Tolan was quoted by Palau’s Island Times as acknowledging the “dark chapter” in scientific history. “Such unethical research should never happen again,” Tolan said in an apology to Palau.
The ball is rolling
Thousands of human remains have been stored in museums across Germany for more than 100 years for the purposes of scientific research.
Amid the growing discussion in recent years about the repatriation of human remains in Germany and Europe, Germany has responded by helping to execute repatriation efforts.
Vunidilo has been involved in several such repatriations through a three-year project at the Georg-August University of Göttingen from Germany since 2022, including the return of ancestral remains to Hawaii and New Zealand, and was also involved in the Palau project.
Vunidilo undertook post-doctoral work at the University of Göttingen, where she was invited to focus on the repatriation of objects and human remains from the Pacific that were previously held in German collections. These include more than 1000 human remains from Oceania, 900 of which come from Papua New Guinea. She is hopeful of further repatriations to Australia and Nauru.
“Nauru is just putting their letters together for their ancestral remains to be returned. This is just from one institution, so my aim is to visit other museums in Germany who have contacted me and said they want to return some of the ancestral returns that they have in their collections. So, this is very exciting, the ball is already rolling from 2022 and I think it will be rolling for the next couple of years.”
Reversing colonial anthropology
Vunidilo sees repatriation as empowering local communities to assert autonomy from the process of colonisation.
“Through colonialism, we often get disempowered to let go of our land, to let go of our identity, our heritage, but repatriation is now reversing that whole process,” says Vunidilo.
“Colonial anthropology has more to do with research from colonial perspective and a non-indigenous perspective,” says Vunidilo. “It is more for them wanting to know the secrets of indigenous communities, how they make use of their land, how they make use of their own resources, how they survive. So, the colonial perspective is mining information for their own benefit, which is the flip side of how myself and a few others, who are in this space, operate.”
Repatriation also allows for reconciliation between the colonisers and the indigenous populations and communities.
“The words reciprocity, reconciliation and the word relationship all come into the picture when repatriation takes place,” says Vunidilo. “It is also a process of healing on lots of levels. This process has allowed a lot of communities and a lot of governments to talk to each other. It has a brought a lot of communities together, even museums. Museums that never used to talk to each other before, repatriation has now opened the door for these museums to have a little more understanding of what was the history of these collections that they are trying to bring back home.”
Vunidilo worked as Head of Archaeology at the Fiji Museum in the 1990s, excavating multiple sites across Fiji. She says it’s a little-known fact that most of the artefacts at the Fiji Museum are from a major repatriation that took place in 1980.
“I was surprised when I did that research because most of us when we came to work at the Museum, we thought most of the artefacts there were collected in the 1900s. The Fiji Museum began in 1904 and so they collected a lot of artefacts, but little did we know that in 1980, they had a big repatriation from England. Most of the artefacts that we have today in Suva were brought in from England.”
