The four representatives of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, which represents the interests of the indigenous Hawaiians, at the return in Bremen. With 58 skulls, they will be heading home later this week.
Image: dpa
A particularly sensitive part of museum collection practice: a delegation from Hawaii receives human remains that the explorer Otto Finsch collected on a burial ground and took with him to Germany.
AWhen the ceremony was over, a small procession walked through the dark courtyard of the James Simon Gallery on Berlin’s Museum Island: five men and a woman, each holding a box. They walked towards a minibus into which they loaded the boxes – a moment that was as profane as it was symbolic. The journey of the remains of thirty-two people back to the place from which they were stolen more than one hundred and forty years earlier had begun.
This was preceded by an event that testified entirely to the efforts of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation to leave the management to those whose ancestors were not asked, when the explorer Otto Finsch collected bones on a burial ground in Hawaii and took them to Germany. The delegation that received the skulls on Friday evening wanted a windowless room in which the homeward journey of the “iwi kūpuna”, the bones of the ancestors, might be prepared according to Hawaiian rites; and an adjoining representative room for the audience and speeches. The auditorium of the James Simon Gallery met the requirements. Berlin was the fourth of five stations visited by the delegation, previously there were returns in Bremen, Göttingen and Jena. This Monday, the four representatives of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, which represents the interests of the indigenous Hawaiians, are at the Vienna Natural History Museum. They will travel home with fifty-eight skulls.