Māori and Moriori believe this return to their homelands will restore dignity to both the dead people and their living descendants. “The single goal of repatriation is not to hold the remains at Te Papa indefinitely but to return them to their communities,” the museum says on its website.Ī team carry 20 mummified Māori heads, repatriated from France, during a ceremony at Te Papa on January 27, 2012. Te Papa Tongarewa oversees the repatriation on behalf of New Zealand’s government. They were returned by seven German institutions: the Grassi Museum in Leipzig Reiss Engelhorn Museums in Mannheim Linden Museum in Stuttgart the Stuttgart State Museum of Natural History Georg August University in Göttingen Roemer und Pelizaeus Museum in Hildesheim and Museum Wiesbaden. The latest repatriation involved the skeletal remains of 95 ancestors of both peoples, together with six mummified tattooed Māori heads. Other institutions that have repatriated relics via the museum include London’s Natural History Museum and the Natural History Museum in Vienna. New Zealand enacted a government program called Karanga Aotearoa in 1990 to retrieve and repatriate the remains of its indigenous people, the country’s Māori, and the Moriori who inhabit the Chatham Islands.īack in 2016, the Smithsonian Institution returned the remains of 54 indigenous people, including four mummified Māori heads, to Te Papa. The face was marked with tattoos to designate identity and status, according to the Smithsonian magazine. In Māori culture, the head was considered the most important part of the body. German institute/Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa Hinemoana Baker and Te Papa's Te Arikirangi Mamaku-Ironside prepare to cover the ancestral remains.
0 kommentar(er)
