Oxford University Museum to Repatriate 39 Colonial-Era Human Remains

The Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford agreed to return a colonial-era collection of human remains to the Indigenous Naga people in India, following years of negotiations, Naga representatives told the New York Times on Saturday. Formal repatriation efforts began six years ago in 2020.

The 39 partial remains that will return to Nagaland by the end of this year include a warrior’s cranium, a woman’s skull, and a young person’s jaw, among others. While there were 40 remains initially requested for return, one “does not have a clear provenance as Naga,” CBS News reported. The museum has had them in its holdings for over 100 years.

“We bring back the light of our ancestors that was dimmed but never extinguished,” Ellen Konyak of the Forum for Naga Reconciliation (FNR) said in an announcement. The nonprofit has been working with the museum and Naga tribal groups on the repatriation.

The remains “have been away from their homeland for far too long,” Laura Van Broekhoven, director of the Pitt Rivers Museum, told AFP in a statement. The museum owns more than 6,000 Naga cultural objects, the world’s largest collection.

Many of the Naga ancestral remains at the museum were donated by British officers J.P. Mills and J.H. Hutton, who were on duty in the Naga areas of British India in the early 1900s. While some objects were given as gifts, most were collected unethically under duress and against the wishes of the community.

“Repatriation, for the Nagas, is not simply about bones and ancestral remains finding their way back to the land but importantly about memory returning to where it belongs,” the FNR and other Naga organizations added.

The remains have become a symbol of Naga struggle, which includes 19th century American Christian missionary efforts that further impaired traditional Naga beliefs and practices, along with decades-long conflict with the Indian state after independence from Britain.

Until 2020, the objects were included in an exhibit called “Treatment of Dead Enemies,” in which they were labeled “headhunting trophies” and displayed alongside remains from other Indigenous groups, including the shrunken heads of the Shuar people of South America and an Egyptian child’s mummy. Since then, the 120 human remains have remained in storage, as part of the museum’s effort to “decolonize” its collections.

The Pitt Rivers Museum is one of many museums, university collections, and private collections, throughout Europe and the United States, still in possession of Naga ancestral remains.

The handover, which is slated for November, will be the largest repatriation of human remains from the museum—a process Van Broekhoven referred to as a “Naga-wide movement of healing and unification.”

The agreement is part of a larger international initiative to repatriate artifacts and human remains acquired by Western institutions during the colonial era.