US EditionNot an Artifact, but an Ancestor: Why a German University Is Returning a Māori Taonga
The carved ancestral pou symbolizes a living ancestor for Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti and was returned after a trust-based partnership despite no legal obligation, reflecting evolving German restitution policies.
3 Articles
3 Articles
Not an artifact, but an ancestor: Why a German university is returning a Māori taonga
Restitution debates—the questions of whether a cultural object should be returned from a museum or other collection to a person or community—often begin with a deceptively simple question: Who owns an object?
More than 250 years ago, the British sailor James Cook brought an ancestral image from New Zealand to Europe. It landed in the collection of a German university. Soon the artifact is to return to its home country.
Not an artefact, but an ancestor: why a German university is returning a Māori taonga
Restitution debates – the question of whether a cultural object should be returned from a museum or other collection to a person or community – often begin with a deceptively simple question: who owns an object? In colonial contexts, this question rarely has a clear answer. Histories of acquisition are often incomplete, disputed and overwhelmingly recorded from European perspectives. Legal documentation, where it exists at all, usually reflects …
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