Dr Vunidilo has called for the Australian government to help return Pacific remains with "the same energy" it gives to repatriating Aboriginal ancestral remains back to country from overseas.
"Our neighbouring countries of Australia and New Zealand can learn from European countries too, like Germany and France as they are opening up their vaults to return ancestral remains to where they truly belong," she said.
'The return of the ancestral human remains of Australian and other Indigenous peoples held in anthropological collections could be sped up using machine-based deep learning according to a new study led by QUT computer scientists.'
New regulations have led museums to take Indigenous artifacts and human remains off display until they can receive consent from the descendants of the people those items were taken from.
Senator Pushes #Museums to Return “Stolen” Native American Remains and Belongings
In a #Senate floor speech that centered America’s colonial history, Brian Schatz said institutions have a moral obligation to comply with federal #repatriation law. He demanded urgent action.
The American Museum of Natural History to Close Exhibits Displaying #Native American Belongings
The change is in response to new federal regulations that went into effect this month following reporting by ProPublica on institutional failures to return #NativeAmerican remains and sacred objects to tribes.
The Remains of Thousands of #Native Americans Were Returned to #Tribes This Year
Following decades of #Indigenous activism and the 2023 publication of ProPublica’s “Repatriation Project,” federal officials have seen more activity leading to the return of ancestral remains to tribal nations than any other year since 1990.
"The Metropolitan Museum of Art says it will return 16 ancient artifacts back to Cambodia and Thailand. The works, mostly sculptures, had been looted from those countries years ago during decades of civil war and unrest.
Among the works are a large head of Buddha made of stone in the seventh century, and a tenth century sandstone goddess statue from the Koh Ker archaeological site."
More than 60 members of #Filipino-#Palestinian families remain housed inside the University of the #Philippines (UP) after struggling to find shelter since their #repatriation from war-torn #Gaza. They will only be allowed to stay with the university – an arrangement brokered by #NGOs – until December 21, before the holiday period. Beyond that, there are no prospects.
New Federal Rules Aim to Speed Repatriations of #Native Remains and Burial Items
The new Interior Department #regulations address long-criticized loopholes and issues identified by ProPublica’s reporting. The updated rules will go into effect in 2024.
The Dutch Supreme Court has ruled that objects borrowed 9 years ago by a museum in Amsterdam from museums in the now Russian-annexed region of Crimea belong to Ukraine and not Russia.
Tribes in #Maine Spent Decades Fighting to Rebury Ancestral Remains. Harvard Resisted Them at Nearly Every Turn.
by Mary Hudetz and Ash Ngu
Dec. 4, 5 a.m. EST
"Donna Augustine was in tears as she read the letter from Harvard University that winter morning in 2013. Looking around the room inside an elementary school on Indian Island, Maine, she saw other elders and leaders from the four Wabanaki tribes were also devastated as they read that the university was denying their request to repatriate ancestral remains to their tribes.
"The Wabanaki tribal nations — an alliance of the #Penobscot, #Passamaquoddy, #Maliseet and #Mikmaq — wanted to rebury the ancestral remains. But Harvard’s #PeabodyMuseum of Archaeology and Ethnology said, as it had in past years, that the tribes didn’t have enough evidence to show that they could be tied, through culture or lineage, to the ancestors whose remains the museum held.
"The denial felt like a rejection of Wabanaki identity for Augustine, a Mi’kmaq grandmother, who had spent years urging Harvard to release Native American remains.
"'Every one of us in that room was crying,' she recalled. 'We jumped through every hoop.'
"The group representing the only four tribal nations in present-day Maine had furnished a deeply researched report documenting their histories in the region, even sharing closely held stories passed down within their tribes from one generation to the next that told of their ancient ties to Maine’s lakes, islands and forests.
"Now they could see it hadn’t been enough for Harvard, which especially prized the remains of 43 ancestors buried for thousands of years near Maine’s Blue Hill Bay.
"Complicating matters for the tribes, another museum, the similarly named but smaller Robert S. Peabody Institute of Archaeology, housed on the campus of the #PhillipsAcademy, a Massachusetts preparatory school, held items from the same ancient burial site.
"Instead of sending a letter as Harvard did, the Phillips Academy museum director, Ryan Wheeler, had asked to meet with the tribes. Seated at the table that morning, he was initially uncertain what he would do. He would later say that it became evident during the meeting that the tribes exhibited a strong connection to the ancestors they sought to claim, both from the report they had provided and their reaction to Harvard’s decision.
"He recalled leaving the meeting certain he would repatriate. 'There was really no question about it,' he later said.
"What the Wabanaki committee and Wheeler didn’t know, however, was just how hard Harvard would push back. In the two years that followed, the director of the Harvard museum went to surprising lengths to pressure Wheeler to reverse his decision.
"A #ProPublica investigation this year into repatriation has shown how some of the nation’s #elite museums have used their power and vast resources to delay returning ancestral remains and sacred objects under the #NativeAmericanGraves Protection and Repatriation Act. By exploiting loopholes in the 1990 law, anthropologists overruled tribes’ evidence showing their ties to the oldest ancestral remains in museums’ collections. We’ve also shown that museums and universities have delayed repatriations while allowing destructive analyses — like DNA extractions — on ancestral remains over the objections of tribes.
"Harvard, where the remains of an estimated 5,500 Native Americans are stored at the Peabody Museum, used these loopholes over the span of three decades to prolong the Wabanaki tribes’ repatriation process while remaining in technical compliance with the 1990 law, our review found.
"For Augustine and her colleagues, few things were more frustrating than knowing that NAGPRA had empowered museums to decide whether Indigenous people had a valid connection to their ancestors. These were the same institutions that had collected the human remains and objects from ancestral burial sites. Despite NAGPRA’s intent to give Indigenous people say over ancestral remains, institutions still made the final decisions on whether to repatriate.
"'The wolves are in charge of how to deal with the sheep,' said #DarrellNewell, a former vice chief of the Passamaquoddy Tribe who helped create the Wabanaki Intertribal Repatriation Committee to accelerate negotiations with the institutions. 'It’s just not a good way.'
"Harvard in recent years has apologized and promised to speed repatriation, saying it aims to repatriate all #NativeAmerican remains and the items once buried with them within the next three years and recently doubled staffing in the Peabody Museum’s repatriation office. However, the school has yet to return more than half of the human remains it reported holding under NAGPRA, according to federal data from November. Only two institutions, of the hundreds that must comply with NAGPRA, hold more human remains than Harvard."
The University of Edinburgh has returned the skulls of four Paiwan warriors to Taiwanese Indigenous leaders, nearly 150 years after their deaths. The repatriation is the first of its kind for Taiwan, according to the university, and comes as Edinburgh and similar institutions across Europe reckon with their colonial past.
UC #Berkeley Takes Significant Step to Repatriate 4,400 Native American Human Remains
It would be the largest repatriation by far at an institution that holds more than 9,000 ancestral remains and has lagged behind in returning its holdings under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
"The debates around the repatriation of treasured objects and loot is not that the past is fixed. It is not about righting wrongs, it is about writing (and righting) the future. It is about the power for former colonies to tell stories with their objects. It is about what these objects symbolise."
A recap of main events today (while i was working on a completely different story so details to come later):
-emergency government and war cabinet formed in #Israel
#Gaza 's only power station stopped working, leaving the territory without main electricity
17 Brits, including children are dead or missing after #hamas attack in Israel
A Racist #Harvard Scientist Commissioned Photos of Enslaved People. One Possible Descendant Wants to Reclaim Their Story.
The images are among the oldest known #photographs of enslaved people in America.
Tamara Lanier’s fight to gain control of them shows there is no clear system in place to repatriate remains of captive Africans or objects associated with them.
[Editorial] A scandal at the British Museum has led to a curator being fired for the theft of potentially thousands of objects and the resignation of the museum’s director. Weekend Editor Eric O. Scott argues it should lead to rethinking the structure of large institutions like the British Museum.
UK university returns warrior skulls to Taiwan’s Indigenous Paiwan people (www.aljazeera.com)
The University of Edinburgh has returned the skulls of four Paiwan warriors to Taiwanese Indigenous leaders, nearly 150 years after their deaths. The repatriation is the first of its kind for Taiwan, according to the university, and comes as Edinburgh and similar institutions across Europe reckon with their colonial past.