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repatriation of aboriginal human remains

delegation outside natural history museum - london 2007 photo coutesy Kevin Brown

handover of remains to tasmanian aboriginal delegation 11 May 2007

Requests for the return of aboriginal human remains have been heard from indigenous communities across the globe. In Australia, indigenous communities and individuals have campaigned for the return of ancestral remains for over 30 years, although objection to the collecting of remains is evident throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and various examples exist of early requests for the return of remains. In the UK, some museums and holding institutions have repatriated remains to Australia, some have narrow criteria for allowing the return of remains, some have policies which oppose repatriation, and others have no written policies at all.

Recent developments in the UK have seen repatriation move into the political sphere, a progression which mirrors that which occurred in Australia and the United States 10-15 years ago and which, it could be argued, is what forced the scientific and museum community in those countries to accept that they no longer had sole rights to decide what should happen to the indigenous human remains in their collections.

Since the 1970s, continued requests by communities to museums, and intensive lobbying of government, have resulted in the return of a significant number of collections and instigated the development of museum policy and state legislation. Significant steps in this process include the return of Truganini’s remains (1976), the Crowther Collection (1985) and other Tasmanian remains (1988) from the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery; the campaign for the return of the Murray Black Collection from the Department of Anatomy of the University of Melbourne in the mid 1980s; the return of the Kow Swamp fossils in 1990 and the return of Mungo Woman in 1992. Today, communities may generally receive ancestral remains when they request them.

Museums in the UK began to receive requests for the repatriation of indigenous remains in the mid 1980s. Visits and representations from the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (‘the TAC’) and the Foundation for Aboriginal and Islander Research Action (‘FAIRA’) brought media attention to the issue and resulted in the return of a number of remains to Australia.

Continued requests, negotiations and campaigns throughout the 1990s led, in 1997, to the return of Truganini’s necklace and bracelet from Exeter City Museum and Art Gallery Museum, Tasmanian hair samples from Edinburgh University, and a Tasmanian skull from Stockholm. In the same year, the skull of Yagan, a Western Australian warrior shot and beheaded in 1833, was exhumed from a Liverpool cemetery (where it had been buried by the Liverpool Museum in the mid 1960s) and returned to Australia. In 2000, Edinburgh University repatriated its remaining collection of Aboriginal remains, and its collection of Hawaiian remains. In 2003 the Royal College of Surgeons, England and Manchester Museum, returned Australian human remains to the National Museum in Canberra followed by Sweden's Museum of Ethnography in 2004 and 2006 the British Museum returned two Tasmanian cremation ash bundles.

In 2007, London' Natural History museum returned the remains of 17 individuals to the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre. In 2008 Aboriginal human remains from Oxford University Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institute USA and Scotland were returned to Austrlia with plans for further returns from Scotland, Brighton UK and Germany's Charite hospital and medical school expected in 2009. Recent returns have been facilitaed by the Australian Government's International Repatriation Program.

repatriation news index

external links

• AIATSIS
  Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander resourse links
• Australian Government International Repatriation Program
• Recomended Reading and Source :
  Collecting the Dead: Archaeology and the Reburial Issue. London: Duckworth. by Dr Cressida Fforde 2004