An Oxford University museum has agreed to return the remains of 39 people who were kidnapped during British colonial rule in India. The university’s Pitt Rivers Museum told Agence France-Presse on Monday that it is preparing to repatriate the remains of 39 people abducted from the Naga community in northeastern India. The decision came after the university approved a restitution request filed by the Forum for Naga Reconciliation (FNR) and other groups. The remains “have been far from their homeland for too long,” museum director Laura Van Broekhoven told CBS News in a statement. “Repatriation, for the Nagas, is not simply about bones and ancestral remains finding their way back to the land, but more importantly, about memory returning to where it belongs,” the FNR and other Naga organizations said in a statement sent to AFP. At the museum, the group’s request covered 40 sets of human remains; However, the university approved the return of 39 of them in July because one “does not have a clear provenance like Naga.” The museum said it was “working closely” with the Naga community to agree on a date for a handover ceremony, which has not yet been set. The Pitt Rivers Museum, one of the world’s leading institutions of anthropology, ethnology and archaeology, holds more than 6,000 Naga artifacts. Dr. Ellen Konyak Jamir, FNR member and coordinator of Recover Restore and Decolonise, a research initiative led by two Naga scholars, told MorungExpress that recovering the artifacts involves a complex process and is not their current focus. In the past, the museum has faced accusations of racism and cultural insensitivity because it displayed its famous collection of shrunken heads and other human remains. In 2020, it removed the collection as part of a broader effort to “decolonize” its collections. “Our audience research has shown that visitors often viewed the museum’s displays of human remains as testimony that other cultures were ‘savage,’ ‘primitive,’ or ‘horrific,'” Van Broekhoven said in a statement at the time. It goes against the museum’s current values. ”The museum finally decided to remove 120 human remains, including tsantsas, Naga trophy heads and the Egyptian mummy of a child. The agreement between the university and the FNR is part of a broader international movement to repatriate artifacts and human remains acquired by Western institutions during the colonial era. Earlier this year, the University of Edinburgh returned the skulls of six people from the Muscogee Nation in the United States. The Muscogee (Creek) Nation, now based in Oklahoma, was made up of the people of the southeastern territory on the Mississippi River. The nation has about 103,000 people and is the fourth largest federally recognized tribal nation in the US. In 2022, London’s Horniman Museum returned 72 artifacts to Nigeria, including 12 Benin bronze artifacts. Meanwhile, Greece has been demanding Britain return the Parthenon marbles for decades, claiming they were looted in the early 19th century by Lord Elgin, the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. London insists they were acquired legally and successive British governments have said the decision rests with the British Museum, where they are kept. More from CBS News Go deeper with The Free Press in:
