Return our Easter Island statue, Chileans urge British Museum in online campaign
THE British Museum has become the target of a growing social media campaign in Chile, where people are stepping up calls for the return of a stone monument taken from Easter Island.
Chileans are demanding the repatriation of a moai statue to Rapa Nui, a territory known as Easter Island, after a campaign was initiated by an influencer based in Santiago last month.
Rapa Nui, which was annexed by Chile in 1888, has a strong Polynesian identity and is more than 2,000 miles from the mainland.
The museum holds two of its treasured statues, which were taken from the island by British surveyors in 1868.
The stone monuments are believed to have been carved on Rapa Nui at some point between 1300 and 1600.
Requests from islanders living on Rapa Nui for the return of the two monuments culminated in a written request for their return in 2018.
Last month, Mike Milfort, a social media influencer in the Chilean capital with more than a million followers online, began a campaign for the museum to return the statues.
Mr Milfort’s campaign gained recognition from Gabriel Boric, the Chilean president, who echoed the calls in a Chilean radio interview last month.
After a flood of comments hit the museum’s social media channels, officials closed the comments on one Instagram post. Comments remain closed on one post made with charity the Youth Project, and are limited on others.
A British Museum spokesman said: “Comments were only deactivated on one social media post.”
However, The Guardian reported that Pedro Edmunds Pao, the Rapa Nui mayor, said the president “should not politicise something that is so holistically, spiritually and culturally important to us”.
The island houses more than 1,000 moai statues, which were crafted centuries before European colonisation.
One of the statues held by the British Museum, the Hoa Hakananai’a, is of noted significance.
The museum claims to have “good and open relations” with colleagues in Rapa Nui. The Guardian reported that Mr Edmunds Pao added: “We are not ruling out that the Hoa Hakananai’a could stay in London and be our great ambassador. But we need to firmly establish that its rightful owner is the culture of Rapa Nui.”