Oxford Museum Returns 39 Colonial-Era Human Remains To Naga People In India

An Oxford University museum on Monday returned the remains of 39 people taken during Britain's colonial rule in India to members of its Naga community.Almost 30 people from the community based in northeastern Nagaland, a mountainous state bordering Myanmar, travelled to Britain for the ceremony, which the museum's director, Laura Van Broekhoven, called a "historic moment".The handover at the Pitt Rivers Museum came as part of a broader trend among Western museums reassessing how they acquired exhibits from other cultures, particularly human remains, and in some cases returning them.The Pitt Rivers, an ethnographic museum founded in the 19th century, has already handed back human remains to Indigenous communities in Australia, New Zealand and the United States.The Oxford museum has more than 6,000 objects representing Naga culture, the largest collection in the world, and is giving back "ancestral human remains", mainly skulls, to the Naga people.

Van Broekhoven hailed it as "a historic moment that will be part of stories told to next generations" in a speech as both sides…