In the early 1920s, the director of the Bristol Museum in Britain received a package containing two human skulls. The donation came from Alfred Hutchins. He had left England seeking brighter horizons and by the late 1800s was living in Southern California. There he became an amateur archaeologist, excavating Native American graves on the Channel Islands. He offered the museum this collection, apparently in honor of his son, who perished during the First World War.

Last week in a ceremony, Bristol Museum officials returned the remains to representatives of the Ti’at Society, a maritime organization of the Tongva, whose forebears lived on the four southern Channel Islands and across the Los Angeles basin for thousands of years. In recent years, the Tongva and their allies, including the Fowler Museum at U.C.L.A., have been working to track down the fate of looted Tongva bodies so that they may be reburied. This effort led the tribe across the Atlantic and to its first international repatriation.

“As Native Americans, we are in a constant state of mourning,” Desiree Martinez, a Tongva member and professional archaeologist, said in an article in The Bristol News, “knowing that our ancestors’ graves have been disturbed and their remains and burial goods removed to sit on museum shelves, all over the world.”

The return of these two Tongva ancestors could easily pass almost unnoticed. However, the repatriation is emblematic of a much larger movement of historical reckoning sweeping across the globe. Museums are reconsidering who is the rightful owner of the objects that fill displays and storerooms. For example, the Netherlands’ national museums have established guidelines for returning objects obtained without consent. In Germany, 16 states agreed in a joint resolution to repatriate items taken during the country’s colonial era. Scotland said it will soon deliver to Canada the stolen skulls of two Beothuk Indians. England’s Natural History Museum recently sent home 37 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ancestral remains to Australia. And that’s just in the first few months of 2019.