Fifty-eight sets of iwi kūpuna, or ancestral Hawaiian skeletal remains, were returned to the islands for reburial this month. Negotiations with museums around the globe started long before — and were not initially successful.
Longtime advocate Edward Halealoha Ayau led a delegation of four community members to bring the iwi home from five institutions in Germany and Austria. The Office of Hawaiian Affairs and the U.S. State Department backed the effort.
He said the February trip went as well as one could hope for, with aloha on the part of all parties.
But Ayau also said there was a long and difficult journey leading up to this trip, which began 32 years ago when he found out that past curators at the Bishop Museum sent Hawaiian remains to institutions around the world.
Ayau said there’s been a sea change in the past few years as more institutions step up to cooperate with repatriation efforts.
"It's come really far. When we first started, the attitude was very antagonistic. Some directors would tell me to stop writing to them, that they were offended by the request for them to turn over what they considered their legal property," he said. "They referred to our ancestors as osteological material that they owned."
"It took a while for the next generation of leadership, if you will, to take over these museums, and for those attitudes to change," he added.
Ayau said it’s hard to know how much work still needs to be done.
"I always say that the worst part about this work is that there’s really no way for us to gauge how well we’re doing. We have no idea how many iwi kūpuna got taken," Ayau told HPR's The Conversation. "When we did Vienna in Austria, the last of the five of this trip, it represented the 128th formal case that I’ve worked on. So I don’t know if that means we’re doing well, or if we’re just scratching the surface."
OHA has provided over $150,000 in grants to community organizations to support the repatriation and reinterment of iwi kūpuna.
Museums across Europe are rethinking their collections following the passage of NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. It sets up a process for human bones and certain cultural items to be returned to native peoples.
"We saw in four cities in Germany, this real willingness to reveal this ugly colonial history, but more importantly to also express the courage and willingness to reconcile," Ayau said. "The way we describe it is that the German people were expressing their aloha to us in the form of repatriation and really supporting our effort to bring them home."
Throughout his years of work, Ayau said perhaps the most hurtful discovery of an iwi kūpuna was the mummified body of a baby girl.
"I just stood there, and I couldn't believe somebody would go into a cave and remove an infant who was preserved by her family, and stole her and sent her to a museum in Philadelphia. I just could not believe a soul could be so evil," he said. "I think that probably stands out in my mind as one of the most special because the elder who was with us, he took her out of the box, and he held her the whole way."
"We had Hawaiian music playing on the radio in the car and he just sang to her, like she was his moʻopuna."
This interview aired on The Conversation on Feb. 24, 2022. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on HPR-1.
