Preparing the biggest homecoming yet of its kind, authorities in New Zealand on Monday received 20 ancestral heads of Maori ethnic people once held in several French museums as a cultural curiosity.
French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand and New Zealand’s ambassador presided over a solemn ceremony at Quai Branly museum in Paris, where the heads were encased in a box – the largest single handover of Maori heads to be repatriated, New Zealand’s embassy said.
Since 2003, the South Pacific country has embarked on an ambitious programme of collecting back Maori heads and skeletal remains from museums around the world. Yet the programme has run into significant obstacles.
France long resisted handing over such cultural artefacts, but a law passed in 2010 paved the way for the return of the Maori heads. They were obtained as long ago as the 19th century, and one as recently as 1999.
Some Maori heads, with intricate tattoos, were traditionally kept as trophies from tribal warfare. But once Westerners began offering prized goods in exchange for them, men were in danger of being killed simply for their tattoos, French museum officials have said.