Anthropologists and community leaders from Nagaland, a remote state in north-eastern India bordering Myanmar, have expressed joy and relief that human remains belonging to their ancestors that had been on display in a British museum for nearly a century are finally being returned.
On Monday, the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford announced that 39 pieces of human remains—including parts of skulls, a finger, and a piece of skin with hair—belonging to the Naga tribes, will be returned to Nagaland after six years of negotiation between the community and the museum.
For the Nagas, the repatriation is not just about “bones and ancestral remains … It is about memory returning to where it belongs,” the community said in a statement.
The Nagas are a transnational Indigenous group of tribes living in India’s north-east and parts of Myanmar, once associated with headhunting but now predominantly Christian.
The Pitt Rivers Museum, home to one of the world’s largest ethnological collections, has more than 6,500 Naga objects, 898 of which were on display. Most of the collection was “coercively” acquired by the colonial administrators James Philip Mills and John Henry Hutton.
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