That 100-year-old exhibit promoted the racist myth that “headhunting” represents a coherent type of “savage” culture, while suggesting that the purpose of a “world culture” museum is to display what was taken from opponents of the British Empire. Since the 1990s, the return of human remains has become a normal part of curatorial practice in UK museums. London’s Natural History Museum returned the human remains of 37 Indigenous people to South Australia’s Narungga community in March 2019. Let’s be transparent about the tens of thousands of human remains taken under colonialism that languish in our museum storerooms. These aren’t iconoclastic attacks on museums, as some will claim, or part of some “culture war”.

Source: The Guardian May 07, 2021 09:22 UTC