Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
So at the University of Birmingham about two and a half years ago we found a collection
of remains from all over the world that was part of our ancient anatomy collection. We
don't really know how that collection came to us, it was probably bequeathed by different
members of the community, but within that collection was a collection of Maori ancestors.
So there were four heads, four just normal skulls and then one tattooed head. I contacted
Te Papa Repatriation Centre in New Zealand, the National Museum has a repatriation centre
there and I've been working for the last two and a half years with Te Herekiekie who's
their Repatriation Manager. So we've always wanted to give them back and although they
came into our collection, we've had no use for them. Deliberately we didn't want to have
a use for them because it would be so dishonourable to use them for teaching and research, so
it's really important to us to give them back to the people that they belonged to, so that
they can be returned to their own soil with their own ancestors.
The programme based at the National Museum in New Zealand is called the Karanga Aotearoa
Repatriation Programme and so the whole purpose of our programme is to locate where our ancestors
are in overseas institutions and museums and request the repatriation back to New Zealand.
Our ancestors are very important to us, they have been taken from our country from about
1770 and they're distributed throughout the whole world. We've been actively contacted
by the Birmingham University. Dr June Jones communicated to me directly about the ancestral
remains that had provenance to New Zealand and one of them was actually a toi moko mummified
head. By the very act of it being a toi moko mummified head, we know that it is one of
our ancestors. These four skulls also here, by association with provenance back to our
country, we know that they are Maori and that they are our ancestors. We've had the privilege
of coming to Birmingham University to engage in our normal cultural practice of acknowledging
the ancestors, uplifting them and now taking them home.
I suppose the ancestors are very much in the living present and to get an understanding of how my people
view our ancestors, really to get a sense of the relationship between past, present
and future. We have a word that we use to refer to the past and that word is mua, but
mua also means in front. So you can see the past is in front of us and it gives you a
sense how our ancestors are actually with us and we're a culture that really has a strong
emphasis on our geniality and our whakapapa, who our ancestors were and what they did and
so ancestors, we recall them every day. It means a lot to bring our ancestors home. It
is about reconnection but it's about reconciling our past and what happened in the past.