iDIDJ Australia Didgeridoo Cultural Hub

Jealous keepers of the sacred bones
TIM ELLIOTT
March 13, 2010

Ngarrindjeri elder Major Sumner performs a smoking ceremony in Scotland in 2008. Photo: Reuters
DEEP within the Pitt Rivers Museum, at the University of Oxford, is a box labelled ''Australia Ngaarindjeri 1900.55.292''. Inside is a human skull, one of four such Aboriginal drinking skulls held by the museum since 1900. Sealed with resin and with string loops for carrying, the skulls were traditionally used as cups by the Ngarrindjeri people of South Australia, who, according to the museum's historical notes, ''generally prefer the skulls of their deceased parents or other near relations, to those of strangers''. Some time in the late 1800s, however, the skulls were collected by an English explorer and horseman called Harry Stockdale, and from there passed onto the museum. Now the Ngarrindjeri want them back.

''Only family members had the right to possess these skulls,'' Uncle Tom Trevorrow, chair of the Ngarrindjeri Heritage Committee, says. ''When you are using that possession, you know that you are being watched over and protected by that person. Now we want to get them back to [our] country and rebury them. If we don't, their spirits won't rest, and bad things will happen in our lands and our waters.''

But efforts to repatriate the skulls have so far been spectacularly unsuccessful. A delegation of Ngarrindjeri elders sent to Oxford in 2008 was first told that the skulls were ''objects'', and as such were not covered by the museum's policy on human remains. ''Then we were told that the items were very valuable,'' Major Sumner, a Ngarrindjeri elder, says. ''We were told that they had been at the museum for a long time, that they were taking good care of them and they wanted to keep them.'' A second delegation, in 2009, got a better reception, leaving Sumner and his fellow elders with the impression that all was on track. But in a curious turnaround, the Pitt Rivers Museum now says that they have never received any request for the return of the skulls.

''I'm a bit stunned by that,'' Sumner says. ''What do they think, we went all that way just to have a look at them?''

The story of the skulls is in many ways a case study of everything that is wrong with the repatriation of indigenous human remains, a slow process that has been made even slower by endless obfuscation, bureaucratic dead-ends and cultural indifference. It's thought that there are still 1000 indigenous human remains held by institutions around the world, including in Italy, Germany, France, Poland, Sweden, South Africa, the Czech Republic, and the United States. But the bulk of the remains - about 600 items - are in Britain.

''There's also the 10,000 remains held in Australian museums,'' Bob Weatherall, chairman of the Centre for Indigenous Cultural Policy, says. ''There's skulls, mandibles, leg bones, arm bones, full skeletons, skin and mummified skins, along with brains, hearts, kidneys, uteruses. In the overseas museums we have even seen foetuses.''

These remains were collected by explorers and anthropologists between 1788 and 1948, in what most Aborigines consider a glorified grave-robbing campaign, when bodies and parts were plucked from trees and ripped from riverbanks, dug up from burial sites and stolen from hospitals, asylums and prisons. Zoologist Eric Mjoberg, who led the first Swedish expedition into the Kimberley in 1910, followed Aborigines on ceremonies, only to later raid their sites, smuggling the remains out of Australia as ''kangaroo bones''. Publication of Mjoberg's diaries, in which he describes ''skeleton hunting'' and depicts Aborigines as cannibals, outraged Swedes, and led, in 2004, to the voluntary return of 18 boxes of bones by Stockholm's Museum of Ethnography.

Efforts to retrieve remains began 25 years ago, when lawyer and Tasmanian Aborigine Michael Mansell secured the return of nine Aboriginal skulls from Paris, where they had been displayed, along with a pelvis, in the anthropological wing of the Musee de l'Homme. In 1990, Mansell and Weatherall travelled to Britain, funded by the Aboriginal Land Councils, ostensibly to retrieve the head of Mansell's great-great grandfather from the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin. While there they also attempted to catalogue remains held by other UK institutions. ''When we went to the University of Edinburgh, for example, we had expected to find 50 remains,'' Weatherall says. ''By the time we left we had found 300.''

Since then, repatriation has been patchy, to say the least. Some museums, such as the University of Edinburgh, have repatriated all their Aboriginal remains; others, such as the Pitts River Museum and London's Natural History Museum, have been less forthcoming. The NHM, whose collection of Aboriginal remains includes one dried head, 124 skulls, and about 20 skeletons (five of which have names and addresses), has strenuously opposed repatriation. In 2006 the museum finally agreed to return to the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre several sets of remains - including one of an Aboriginal woman who had been shot by a white settler and later decapitated - but only after a legal battle during which the TAC was represented by human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson. Even then, the museum attempted at the last moment to carry out destructive DNA sampling and tomography scans, claiming that remains were ''a unique and irreplaceable resource to advance knowledge for current and future generations''.

Australia has long supported repatriation, unconditionally and as quickly as possible. The federal government runs both the International Repatriation Unit, which negotiates with overseas institutions, and the domestic Return of Indigenous Cultural Property (RICP) Program, which began in 2001. The International Repatriation Unit has repatriated 80 remains from five overseas institutions in the past 18 months, but says that its work is complicated by the fact that none of the countries it is currently dealing with have laws covering international repatriation. The US has a law for Native American remains within the US, and Britain has passed the Guidance for the Care of Human Remains in Museums and the Human Tissue Act, in 2004. But this is only a guidance document, and is often trumped by the museums' own policies, which have in the past expressly prohibited de-accessioning and repatriation. In the absence of any legal obligation, repatriation is on a case-by-case basis, often coming down to the ethics of the individual institution.

''Australia sees repatriation of human remains as ethical,'' says Dr Michael Pickering, head of the repatriation program at the National Museum of Australia. ''In Europe, however, they often see it as unethical and anti-scientific.'' The International Council of Museums (ICOM) ethics code states that members ''should refrain from any activity or circumstance that might result in the loss of … academic and scientific data'', a clause that has frequently been used by museums to delay repatriation. And recent statements by ICOM have discouraged curators from doing anything that might create ''gaps in knowledge'', a phrase commonly regarded as code for ''repatriation''.

''Museums have used this allegiance to science like religious dogma,'' Pickering says. ''They say, 'You can't do that, it's unscientific!' But in reality it's all just parochial, dog in the manger stuff: the most vocal opponents to repatriation tend to be the anthropologists in the museums, because without their collections they don't have a job.''

The attitude reflects an institutional conservatism prevalent in Europe, where museums have increasingly become private treasure troves. ''There is a culture of 'personal' ownership of collections which is not unique to Britain. In fact compared with the rest of Europe the British have been amazingly progressive. The French just cross their arms and say go away.''

Sometimes the conservatism goes deeper. ''A lot of these people look at Aborigines as biologically inferior,'' Bob Weatherall says. ''To them we are just tools of the trade.''

In 2003, Weatherall and Sumner were part of an Aboriginal delegation negotiating with London's Natural History Museum. Towards the end of the discussion, the museum's head of collections, who had for some time been staring intently at Weatherall, leaned across and asked him if he would donate his remains when he died, ''so we can research you''.

''Bob went right off,'' Sumner recalls. ''I thought he was going to strangle the bloke.''

Responding to what many saw as the glacial pace of repatriation, the federal government last October announced the appointment of an eight member International Repatriation Advisory Committee. The committee, all of whose members were Aborigines, was charged with ensuring ''more grassroots input'' and participation from local indigenous communities, something that has been lacking in the past.

''All we want,'' Weatherall says, ''is for the government to hand control of the repatriation process over to us. They say that we can't negotiate on our own behalf, but we have done it in the past.'' Despite being a member, Weatherall describes the committee as ''tokenistic'' and ''biased''. ''It's still run by the government. The way they manage us is just like the mission days.''

Another committee member, Christopher Wilson, said encouraging Aboriginal communities to get more vocal could be difficult. ''Some groups are concerned about criticising the process, because the museums, especially if they are overseas, can simply cut off contact.''

This certainly proved the case with Pitt Rivers Museum. When The Age tried to follow up progress on the repatriation of the drinking skulls, the museum's joint head of collections, Jeremy Coote, denied ever having received a request. The Age then pointed out that the museum had been approached not once but twice by the Ngarrindjeri, in conjunction with a representative of the Australian government. The response since has been deafening silence.

With research by TAYISSA BARONE