The sound of weeping was heard on the shoreline of Wellington. The procession moved slowly. Their heads were adorned with plants. There were 64 people walking at the center of the group.
The remains of their ancestors were stolen from their graves and kept in a Vienna museum for more than a century. It has taken 77 years to get them back. The ancestors were placed at the entrance of the marae and covered with blankets and feathers. The crowd was laughing and singing.
Dr Arapata Hakiwai says there is a wide range of emotion. Also, absolute joy and connection. The ancestors came back.
It has taken decades to fully understand how they were taken. An Austrian taxidermist arrived in New Zealand in 1877. He won the trust of the Mori king Twhiao and was allowed to roam through the land.
The years that followed followed carefully locating and surveilling the most sacred sites of his host. He hid skulls, human remains, and treasures from the world and smuggled them back to Europe to be displayed. In diaries he wrote about his time in New Zealand, he discussed the lengths he took to evade his hosts, as well as the amount of violation he experienced in Mori culture.
My companion told me that if the Mori found out we had skulls in our backpacks they would kill us. He wrote that he took all the skulls. He says that Robbing the graves is one of the hardest things to do because they are sacred and no one is allowed to enter them. The sinners would be punished with death. The remains of 49 people were shipped to Europe to be displayed. They found their way to the Natural History Museum in Vienna even though Austrian museums didn't show much interest in them.
It would be years before most of the tribes discovered the crime, with many finding out only when the son of the man who committed the crime translated his diaries. Hakiwai said that the pain was acute, and that the shock and grief of knowing it was true made it hard to come to terms with it. Ancestors are not relics of the past for Mori, they must remain revered and connected to the past. He says that the word for our past is Mua. Mua is also a word that meansahead. It's clear that our past is in front of us. We are connected to our ancestors.
The iwi started calling for their ancestors to come back. When the Mori battalion fought for the Allies in the second world war, they tried to get their ancestors to come home. Repatriation requests were turned down many times.
The stance of the museum began to change. The head of the international collection was just starting to work there when the repatriation team came back to Vienna. She says the conversation had a big effect. I felt like I had been given a mission.
The collection contains human remains and other artifacts. At times the unintelligible journals were used to find out what he did and where. We were able to get 1,500 pages of diaries and they were all terrible. She said that they asked if they could see what he wrote about it. It's unimaginable how much effort and time it takes. A formal request for a return was made in 2020. It was given this time.
The remains of people who died in New Zealand were returned to their families this week. She apologized for the hurt done. Scientists should apologize for doing things in the name of science.
One of the things the New Zealand government has been pushing for is more repatriations from Austria. Mori remains, particularly tattooed and mummified heads, were traded quickly in the early 1800s, and until the 1970s ancestral remains of Mori were traded as curiosities. New Zealand is at the forefront of global efforts to return the remains of people who have been stolen. There is still a long way to go, but they have been able to negotiate more than 600 returns.
The chair of the repatriation advisory panel says that their ancestors are not resting in peace in institutions overseas. That's repugnant to us. We heard our ancestors cry out to be returned to New Zealand, and we could feel the satisfaction in knowing that they were going back to where they belonged.
The acting head of repatriation says that the program that addresses reconciliation through repatriating ancestral human remains is very fortunate. A lot of Indigenous communities don't have that.
They hope to clear a path for other Indigenous communities to do the same by building relationships with overseas institutions.
Temara says that they look to us as a hope for the return of their people.
Human remains from international museums are being returned to their native countries.
Hakiwai says that many museums believed that the cultures they were documenting were on the verge of extinction. They are now confronted by descendants of the people they stole from. It is an issue for museums that they don't acknowledge that there are real connections between the treasures held in these museums and the ancestral remains that are still living in us.
Unless museums confront and own their past, they will not be able to embark in the future.
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