The remains of indigenous people from all over the world have ended up in various British institutions. Why do their descendants have so much trouble getting them returned?

In November 2011, Ned David travelled the 8,500 miles from his home on Thursday Island, off the tip of Queensland, Australia, to the Natural History Museum in London. He was on a mission to collect the bones of his ancestors. The material included skulls, a jawbone and other fragments from the Torres Strait archipelago, collected by Europeans in the 19th century as scientific specimens and anthropological curios. The museum had agreed that the remains should be given back to their “originating community”, and it was finally time to take them home.

A private ceremony was held – David is reluctant to share the details with outsiders – and afterwards he and his fellow islanders went back to their hotel. But the mood wasn’t celebratory. “Mate,” he says, “it was sombre with a capital ‘S’. There was sort of this eerie feeling after all the hoo-ha and the media, and whatever. We sat around and no one spoke. I think it took a long time to realise the significance of what we had done.”

The handover had followed a consultation in which islanders were asked what they wanted to do about body parts that were sitting in collections on the other side of the world. Feelings ran high. “It’s probably one of those rare exercises we have done as a nation in which we were in total agreement with each other,” says David, who chairs the Gur A Baradharaw Kod, or Torres Strait Sea and Land council. “As one elder said: ‘How would you feel knowing that one of your family members is in some strange place and, more importantly, hasn’t been afforded the right burial?’ That has an impact on the psyche of a group.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Detail depicting the death of Tewodros II. Photograph: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images

The islanders aren’t alone in their campaign to reclaim human remains from European museums. On 20 March this year, more than 150 years after they were cut from the corpse of the Ethiopian emperor Tewodros II by a British soldier, two locks of hair were returned by the National Army Museum in London after a request from Addis Ababa. A few days later, Norway’s King Harald V and Queen Sonja signed an agreement to repatriate thousands of artefacts, including a number of skulls, to the Rapa Nui people of Easter Island. And in April, German institutions will conduct their largest ever transfer of remains to Australia, involving 53 items from five sites in Munich, Stuttgart and Berlin. This follows a “joint declaration on the handling of colonial collections” by ministers from all 16 German states, which argued that human material “does not belong” behind glass.

These moves are dramatic, but in a sense, they represent the easier side of the restitution question. As the Greek president, Prokopis Pavlopoulos, reminded us recently – when he called the British Museum a “murky prison” holding the Parthenon marbles as “trophies” – art and artefacts have traditionally generated greater controversy. This week, the British secretary of state for culture, Jeremy Wright, ruled out any change in the law to allow national museums to return objects to their countries of origin.

In contrast, the moral case for giving back body parts, many taken without regard to the feelings of indigenous people who at the time were judged to be less than human, is harder to dispute. They are frequently in storage rather than on public display, and often of limited scientific interest. A 2,000-year-old piece of sculpture that pulls in the crowds is more difficult to give up.

Even so, says Sarah Morton, a lecturer in heritage at Bath Spa University, there has been a change in the way restitution is seen. “There’s more thinking about collections from the point of view of how things were acquired and the circumstances they were taken in,” she says. “People are addressing the colonial foundations of museums and challenging that.” She mentions the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, which makes a point of its engagement with indigenous peoples. In 2018, it hosted the Museum Ethnographers Group annual conference, which had the theme of “decolonising the museum in practice”. For many institutions in the UK, Morton says: “It’s now about asking: how do we work with the communities these objects or remains came from? They may want them back, or they may be quite happy for them to stay in the museum and to work with the museum. But the ‘we’ve got them, they’re ours, we can do what we want’ position is starting to be untenable.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Te Papa staff sit next to a wooden box containing a mummified Māori head in Wellington, New Zealand, in 2011. It was returned from France. Photograph: Mike Heydon/Getty Images

That view is echoed by Janet Dugdale, executive director at National Museums Liverpool, which includes the city’s World Museum, home to 40,000 objects of ethnographic significance including 10,000 from Africa and 6,000 from Oceania. “Thirty years ago, museums would probably be saying: ‘They’re in our collection, we own them and it’s really important that they’re here in this country for people to research and understand them.’” There was also the anxiety – that has not entirely dissipated – about a domino effect. “The fear was: if you let one thing go, does that mean everything’s going to leave? And, of course, that doesn’t happen.” The process of deciding what to ask for, and gathering supporting evidence, is hugely labour-intensive for indigenous communities and even national governments, so a torrent of claims is unlikely. Calls for restitution are nevertheless part of a modern museum’s workload. “We absolutely acknowledge where our collections are from,” says Dugdale. “And if you do that, you have to be open to having some different conversations. But it’s not going to be the case that suddenly all museums are going to be denuded of everything. That’s just not realistic.”

As far as human remains are concerned, the shift in thinking may have come earlier to Britain than elsewhere in Europe. In 2000, the British and Australian prime ministers, Tony Blair and John Howard, issued a joint statement pledging to increase repatriation to Australian indigenous communities, the source of so much human material in UK museums. “In doing this,” it said, “the governments recognise the special connection that indigenous people have with ancestral remains, particularly where there are living descendants.”

But a piece of the jigsaw was missing. Under English law, national museums were banned from permanently giving up anything in their collections, except under very specific circumstances. Change came from an unexpected quarter: a scandal at Alder Hey children’s hospital in Liverpool, which had stored organs taken from dead children without their parents’ consent, prompted a legislative overhaul. In 2004, the Human Tissue Act was passed. It included a clause stating that national museums had the power to transfer human remains less than 1,000 years old out of their collections “if it appears to them to be appropriate to do so for any reason”. It was this act that allowed the Natural History Museum to return the Torres Strait Islander bones, and the World Museum to give a skull to representatives of the Ngarrindjeri people of South Australia in 2009.

Yet there are still hurdles to overcome. Even success stories don’t come entirely without friction. According to Ned David, a Natural History Museum staff member raised the possibility of joint custody over the Torres Strait remains. “They sent one of their guys out to talk to us … he asked a couple of questions around the idea of shared rights, and I said: ‘I can’t see how you would think that I would even entertain that – I mean … which human being on this planet would want to share one of their family members? This is not some kind of object or property.’” For its part, the museum states that “it was always made clear that the return of these remains was unconditional, and we are not aware of these discussions”.

In other cases, claims can fall foul of a museum’s own rules on restitution. In March 1819, a group of British furriers trekked up the frozen Exploits River in Newfoundland to find native Beothuk people whom they suspected of having stolen fish and other supplies. They came upon an encampment, surprising its inhabitants, who tried to flee. One of them, Demasduit, unable to run in the snow, was said to have turned and bared her breasts – to show her attackers she was a nursing mother. Her husband, Nonosabusut, was stabbed to death by the furriers with a bayonet while he tried to defend her. Demasduit survived and was taken to the city of St John’s, where she died of tuberculosis. She was buried next to her husband. Within a generation, the Beothuk had been wiped out.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A portrait believed to be based on one of Demasduit. Photograph: The Picture Art Collection/Alamy

At some point in the 1820s, the skulls of this tragic couple were disinterred and taken to Edinburgh, ending up in the National Museum of Scotland. Misel Joe, a modern-day Mi’kmaq chief whose lands are near those of the Beothuk, has been calling for Demasduit’s return since 2012, but came up against the museum’s human remains policy, which says the claim must be supported by a national government. In 2015, he visited the museum and was allowed to perform a purification ceremony over the skulls, which were not on public display. He told CBC at the time: “Maybe what I need to do is go and dig up [Robert] Burns … maybe that will open somebody’s eyes … I mean, what’s the difference in me going to dig up Burns and bringing him back to study in Newfoundland than them taking the remains of our people to study for all these years?”

When the Canadian government did get behind him in 2017, the request failed again because it proposed housing them in a provincial rather than a national museum. In January this year, an agreement was reached to relocate the remains to the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Quebec, 900 miles from Newfoundland. Joe says he hopes they can one day be moved closer to their former resting place.

The British Museum’s returns policy starts from a presumption “that the … collection should remain intact”. Since the passing of the Human Tissue Act, it has returned two cremation ash bundles to the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, and nine human bone fragments to Te Papa, New Zealand’s national museum. But it has refused to hand over seven preserved Māori tattooed heads, as well as the skulls of two named individuals from the Torres Strait island that had been decorated for use in divination (none of these items are on public display). Ned David was one of the signatories to the Torres Strait request, and is still furious. “Bloody bastards, mate, they are just bastards. They are the most … I can’t say anything good about them, man. They’re just, well, they’re the BM I guess, no one tells them what to do, eh? There’s not an ounce of humanity in that friggin’ group, I tell you.

“I’ve sort of taken a break from thinking about this stuff because it really got me down. It knocked me for six. I think basically they said that we had lost connection with those remains. They’re bloody thieves, they stole it, they nicked it. There’s no way in the world they have any right to hold on to those remains.” He sighs and says: “I just went from zero to 100 then, sorry.”

The museum’s minutes show that, rather than any concern over a “lost connection” to the skulls, the problem was instead that there was no evidence they had been intended for burial or “mortuary disposal”. Instead, the board believed they were “traded as objects of power by Torres Straits Islanders, and served in their negotiations with Europeans”. In other words, they were exchanged fairly and squarely, not robbed from a grave or taken from unsuspecting relatives.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hendrick Fourmile of the Gimuy Walubara Yidindji in Munich during a handover of Aborigine remains earlier this month. Photograph: Matthias Balk/AFP/Getty Images

Jonathan Mazower, a campaigner with Survival International, which has intervened on behalf of indigenous people to halt the auction of objects of spiritual significance, isn’t convinced. “I think for these items that were collected during the colonial era, you can’t imagine that people were in a genuine position to give their free consent in a way we would think adequately met the definition of the term.”

What would a humane policy look like to him? “Museums should commit themselves to the return of objects if the people who own them want them back. And where they are human remains, they should treat them as those of people who have died recently and simply honour the wishes of their descendants. It’s impossible to think that if the boot were on the other foot, and they were remains of western people who were held in foreign museums, that we’d be happy to see them either on display or just in a box or cupboard.”

For David, 53, there is no question of giving up, although has begun to wonder whether he will live to see the end of a process he helped start. “I’ve just got to get some of my energy back to take the fight on again,” he says. “It’s not over by a long shot.”