Chicago’s Field Museum returns Maori remains to New Zealand

WELLINGTON, New Zealand – A U.S. museum returned the tattooed head of a Maori and bones from 13 others Monday, the latest repatriation of indigenous remains from overseas museums, a Maori expert said.\n“The ancestors were welcomed back on to Te Papa’s marae (National Museum meeting place)” and were placed in a sacred area with scores of other returned remains, said Arapata Hakiwai, director of Maori treasures at Wellington’s Te Papa National Museum.\nRepresentatives of Maori tribes took part in the ceremony, along with staff from The Field Museum in Chicago and American Indian First Nation tribal members.\n“For all of us (it’s) a very emotional time to be returning at last the (remains) to New Zealand,” Field Museum Curator of Pacific anthropology John Terrell told The Associated Press.\nHakiwai, who was part of the group that accompanied the remains from Chicago, said the museum had “made the right decision on the right grounds – it was the right thing to do.”\nThe repatriation makes The Field Museum one of the first major U.S. museums to return Maori remains, many of which Westerners collected when Maori offered mummified heads in a grisly exchange for guns and other goods.\nHakiwai said it would be a long, slow process for museum researchers seeking to confirm which tribal area the remains had been taken from in the late 19th century.\nIt was impossible to tell at this stage whether they were from slaves or cherished family members.\nMaori activists have urged museums worldwide for years to relinquish such human relics, saying it’s a matter of showing respect to the dead and to Maori.\nHakiwai said his museum had acquired repatriated Maori remains from more than 30 institutions worldwide since 2003.\nSeveral other U.S. museums still hold Maori heads and bones, including the American Museum of Natural History, which has some 35 severed Maori heads.