Saxony brings back the bones of the colonial era to the Māori and Moriori

Leipzig – Saxony He brought back human bones from the colonial era.

In a ceremony at the Grassi Museum of Ethnology in Leipzig on Tuesday, the Aboriginal remains were handed over to a delegation of Maori from New Zealand and Moriori from the Chatham Islands.

Bone and hair samples from 64 people were in the possession of the State Ethnographic Collections (SES) in Saxony. They came from serious plundering and victims of violent conflicts.

According to the museum, the island nation’s ambassador, Craig John Hook, Saxony’s Minister of Arts Barbara Klebisch (57, CDU) and SES Director Leontien Meijer van Menesch took part in the repatriation ceremony.

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“The return of today’s Māori and Moriori ancestors is an important step in addressing the colonial legacy of Saxony’s Free State groups,” explained Klesch.

The fact that the descendants of the deceased can be welcomed at the Grassi Museum makes it possible to “help shape the process of reconciliation and healing,” says director Meijer van Mensch.

Human bones came to Saxony between 1870 and 1905 as a purchase or gift.

The return to Leipzig is part of a series of nationwide resettlement operations in Germany to New Zealand.

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The Linden Museum in Stuttgart, the Natural History Museum in Stuttgart, the Roemer and Pelizaeus Museum in Hildesheim, the Reiss-Engelhorn Museum in Mannheim, and the University Collection in Göttingen are also participating.

Free State first met a return request in 2017, from Hawaii. Most of the bones came to Saxony during the colonial period and are preserved there in anthropological collections.