Stolen Maori remains repatriated home

The ghosts of New Zealand’s colonial past have taken 59 more steps to being laid to rest.

Yesterday afternoon, the remains of 59 Maori and Moriori – stolen in a bygone era and taken to museums around the world – returned home to a ceremony at Te Papa.

Te Papa kaihautu Arapata Hakiwai, who travelled to Europe to pick the ancestral remains up, said international institutions were beginning to realise the importance of returning remains.

‘‘They are realising many ancestors were taken by unethical means,’’ he said.

Two of the remains were skulls taken in 1890 by Swedish natural historian Conrad Fristedt, who spent time in the Bay of Islands and kept his discoveries secret from Maori living in the region.

A toi moko – tattooed preserved Maori head – was also among the returned remains.

The remains had been repatriated from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, the Ubersee Museum in Germany, the Manchester University Museum in England, and the Pitt Rivers Museum in England.

Te Papa would help return the remains to iwi, thought to be in the Chatham Islands, Northland, Waikato and French Pass in Marlborough, as well as other remains with no fixed heritage that would be given the general provenance of Aotearoa New Zealand.

The repatriation is the latest in a string of such events, including 60 returned in 2016.

The largest repatriation of remains was in 2014, when 107 ancestors were returned from the American Natural History Museum in New York. The collection was gathered by British soldier Major Horatio Robley. More than 400 individuals have been returned from institutions worldwide since 1990. — Fairfax