Sacred remains: ancestors return home

Ceremonial handover of iwi kupuna to descendants from Hawai'i Photo: Peter Heller Göttingen University hands over iwi kÅ«puna from collections to Hawaiian descendants When the anatomist Georg Thilenius excavated a number of skulls and skeletons on the island of Maui in 1897, he violated the prevailing Hawaiian laws that prohibited the removal of human remains from burial sites. Nevertheless, the stolen iwi kÅ«puna (ancestral Hawaiian skeletal remains) reached the University of Göttingen via the Hamburg Museum of Ethnology in 1953. On Wednesday 9 February 2022, thirteen iwi kÅ«puna were returned to their descendants from HawaiÊ»i during a ceremonial event. "With this return, we express our deep respect for and solidarity with the Hawaiian culture," said the President of the University of Göttingen, Professor Metin Tolan. The iwi kÅ«puna were identified by scholars working on the Volkswagen Foundation-funded research project -Sensitive provenances: human remains from colonial contexts in the collections of the University of Göttingen-. The focus was on the Blumenbach Collection and the Anthropological Collection. "Our investigations enabled us to determine where at least some of the remains came from and how they ended up in the two collections," explains Dr Marie Luisa Allemeyer from the Centre for Collection Development of the University of Göttingen.