Oxford Museum Hands Back Remains of 39 Naga People Taken in the Colonial Era

An Oxford University museum on Monday handed back the remains of 39 Naga people taken from India during British colonial rule, closing a six year process at a ceremony in the museum's Victorian hall. Almost 30 members of the Naga community travelled from Nagaland, the mountainous state in northeastern India that borders Myanmar, to receive the remains at the Pitt Rivers Museum.

The museum's director, Laura Van Broekhoven, called the handover a "historic moment" as both sides signed a formal agreement. She said it was "a historic moment that will be part of stories told to next generations", AFP reported. By the time she spoke, the remains were already on their way to Heathrow airport, after what she called "so much red tape everywhere".

What was returned

The museum described the remains as ancestral human remains, mainly skulls. One of them is a chief's head, said anthropologist Dolly Kikon, a member of Nagaland's Lotha-Naga community. The remains were brought to Oxford between 1910 and 1940, and most were collected by two colonial administrators who were also anthropologists, J.H. Hutton and J.P. Mills. The museum says on its website that items gathered in that era were frequently confiscated during punitive military expeditions rather than freely given.

Thejao Vihienuo, a 73 year old tribal leader draped in a traditional shawl, questioned how the remains could ever have left Naga land. "I suspect that nobody would have given the skull of his father or his grandfather as a gift to another person", he told AFP.

A burial planned in Kohima

Naga tribal leaders who united for the handover plan to bury the remains together under a joint memorial in a park. "We shall put them to respectful rest", Vihienuo said. In Kohima, the state capital, the Naga Solidarity Park management committee allocated a burial site inside Naga Solidarity Park on November 7 and held a prayer service that morning to start preparing the ground, the Nagaland Post reported.

The return is the museum's largest repatriation of human remains. The Pitt Rivers holds more than 6,000 objects representing Naga culture, the largest Naga collection in the world, and it has previously handed remains back to Indigenous communities in Australia, New Zealand and the United States.

Six years of work

The museum removed all human remains from display in 2020 and began the dialogue that led to Monday's ceremony. "It's been six years of working alongside each other on a very delicate matter", Van Broekhoven said. The museum still holds around 2,700 human remains in storage. The remains in its care "were collected in times that had different ethics, different thinking, which was not unproblematic when we look at it with the eyes of today", she said.

The Forum for Naga Reconciliation, an association of 39 Naga organisations, submitted a formal claim for 40 ancestral remains. Oxford University Council agreed to return 39, setting one aside because its provenance as Naga was not clear. While in Oxford, the Naga delegation also met descendants of one of the anthropologists who collected the remains.

For the families receiving them, the ceremony in Oxford was the start of the journey, not the end. The remains now travel to India, where the burial in Kohima will put them to rest on Naga land for the first time in more than 80 years.