A team from the Office of Hawaiian Affairs and Hui Iwi Kuamoʻo is returning to Hawaiʻi after receiving three iwi kūpuna, or ancestral remains, in formal ceremonies this week from the National Museums Northern Ireland – Ulster Museum.
In October 2021, OHA filed a claim for the repatriation of five iwi kūpuna and five mea kapu, or sacred objects, believed to be in the museum's possession. The team traveled to Northern Ireland in April 2022 and retrieved two iwi kūpuna and the five mea kapu.
The Ulster Museum was able to locate the three missing iwi kūpuna in November 2024.
"Whilst the motivation behind the acquisition of ethnological material can appear strange today, it reflected curiosity about the wider world and a desire to represent diverse cultures,” said Kathryn Thomson, the chief executive of NMNI, in a news release. "However, the European bias and power imbalances that often characterized this collecting have left a complex and sensitive legacy for us to address today.”
A news release said that in 1840, ethnologist Gordon Augustus Thomson of Belfast traveled to Hawaiʻi Island and found and removed the iwi kūpuna from burial caves. He donated the iwi kūpuna to the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society in 1857.
The iwi kūpuna and moepū, or burial items, were later included in a donation to the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery, a precursor to the Ulster Museum and NMNI, in 1910.
Hui Iwi Kuamoʻo founder Halealoha Ayau called the removal illicit and a form of desecration.
"We don't have to know who these people are, we just have to know they are Hawaiian,” said Ayau in an interview with BBC News. "The living have a responsibility to bring them back and to replant them into our land. They can continue their journey to decompose, become elemental again, and their spirit(s) allowed to travel on."
The iwi will be reinterred on Hawaiʻi Island.
