02-08-2025
A bid to undo a colonial-era wrong touches a people's old wounds
Their efforts to repatriate ancestral remains, which have been in a British museum for more than a century, have been 'a trigger for the Nagas,' said Dolly Kikon, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who is Naga herself.
Naga society has changed immensely since those remains were taken. To contemplate their return means reckoning with those changes, and with how many of them are the result of external forces and violence.
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Members of Naga communities in northeastern India have worked for five years with the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford, whose collection of Naga cultural objects is the largest in the world, toward the goal of repatriating the hundreds of human remains in the collection. In June, a delegation of 20 Naga leaders, elders and scholars visited the museum and saw those objects for the first time.
'I stood there beside them quietly, feeling a deep sorrow in my heart,' Kikon said.
The human remains in the collection, which number more than 200, include a warrior's cranium, a woman's skull decorated with buffalo horns and a piece of skin with hair attached.
Naga tradition holds that human remains are sacred, carrying life and spirit. 'They are restless, the spirits will not be in peace unless they find a resting place,' said K. Ongshong, a Naga elder from Longleng village in the Indian state of Nagaland.
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Most of the remains were donated to the museum by J.P. Mills and J.H. Hutton, British colonial administrators in northeastern India. While some were given to the men as gifts, most were collected against Naga people's will during military expeditions into villages, according to experts.
For years, the skulls were included in a Pitt Rivers exhibit titled 'Treatment of Dead Enemies,' under the label 'headhunting trophies' alongside remains from other Indigenous groups, including the well-known shrunken heads of the Shuar people of South America.
That changed in 2020, when 120 of the human remains in the collection, including the shrunken heads and Naga remains, were removed from display and put in storage. In their place stand blue information boards explaining the contentious collection and the museum's decolonization efforts. 'These displays didn't match with our values any more,' Laura Van Broekhoven, the museum's director, said in an interview.
Headhunting was practiced among Naga warriors, who collected the heads of enemies they killed in raids or war. (Despite the labeling by the museum, experts said it was unlikely that all the Naga skulls were enemy trophy heads; some may have been taken from burial sites.) Because of the gruesome nature of the practice, and the way it helped to feed a persistent stereotype of the Nagas as violent and warlike, some Nagas are hesitant to bring the remains home.
The repatriation discussions are also touching on deeper wounds for many of the Naga people, who number about 2.5 million.
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That is clear from the difficulties raised, in this case, by one of the first questions in any repatriation process: Where should these objects go?
Today, most Nagas live in the Indian state of Nagaland. But Naga communities can also be found in the states of Assam, Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh -- and in Myanmar. Before the British colonists drew their borders, the Nagas lived in a contiguous region loosely known as the Naga hills, now divided among those modern states.
In 1928, Nagas began making formal demands for independence, not wanting to be a part of the British Raj or India. 'The Nagas shared no cultural similarities with India,' said Akum Longchari, a peace and conflict activist based in Nagaland.
But when the British left the subcontinent in 1947, Nagas were brought under the control of the Indian state. Decades of political struggle and armed resistance followed, broadly known as the Naga National Movement.
India saw it as a threat and suppressed the insurgency. The fighting killed thousands over the years. India implemented laws that gave sweeping powers to its security forces and protected them from prosecution, which experts say led to human rights violations.
Although a ceasefire was reached in 1997, the state of Nagaland remains one of India's most militarized regions. For some Nagas, the truce feels precarious, and much suspicion and mistrust remain.
Longchari said Naga society had been in a constant state of struggle since British colonization in the 1800s. 'Nagas have had no time for reflection,' he said, adding, 'One colonizer left and another took their place right after.'
Another factor complicating the repatriation process is the enduring legacy of American Christian missionaries, who first arrived in the Naga hills in the 19th century.
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If the remains are laid to rest, some Nagas wonder, what funeral rituals should they be accorded -- the rites of Christianity, since that is the religion most Nagas now follow, or traditional, animistic ones?
Knowledge of those older rites may now be limited, since the missionaries changed the region's culture along with its religion, said Nepuni Piku, a human-rights activist.
'They did not just come with their Bible, but with their cultural baggage,' Piku said. Naga culture was painted as backward and outdated, Christianity as modern, which led to the abandonment of many Naga cultural practices and rituals, he said.
Naga activists and scholars, along with the Forum for Naga Reconciliation in Nagaland, a civil society organization, have been trying to build consensus on these questions and more. Once there is agreement on a plan for repatriating the remains and artifacts, a claim will be made to the university. If the university accepts the claim, then the governments of both countries will get involved.
Last fall, a two-day conference on the proposed repatriation brought together community elders, scholars and students in a nondenominational Christian church in Dimapur, the largest city in Nagaland.
A college student at the conference asked what relevance the traditions of the past had for the urban world he inhabits. Loina Shohe, a sociologist, replied that Naga culture, like any other, is not static but evolves with time. 'Our ancestors were self-sustained, not primitive or savage,' she said.
The Nagas' history has caused them immense intergenerational trauma, Dr. P. Ngully, a psychiatrist in Nagaland, said in an interview last year. He was part of the delegation that visited Oxford, one month before he died in July. Such trauma, which he called an 'invisible epidemic,' can exacerbate alcohol and substance abuse, he said, problems that Naga society is trying to address among its youth.
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Some younger Nagas are looking for ways to reconcile with that traumatic history.
Throngkiuba Yimchungru, 35, conducts art workshops that he calls DeConstructing Morung. Long ago, morungs were youth dormitories where Nagas came together to socialize -- one of the traditions lost to Christianity and time. Yimchungru said he wanted to adapt the concept to the present.
'Morungs can be anywhere -- in a school, office, within a big city,' he said. 'They needn't be within an architectural structure.'
Nagas' discussions with the Pitt Rivers Museum have also been an attempt to reconcile with the past. But the return of the remains in the museum's collection could conceivably take decades. The fastest repatriation the museum has ever carried out took a year and a half, while the longest -- the repatriation of Tasmanian human remains -- took 45.
The Naga delegation to the museum opened its June visit with an Indigenous chant that alludes to the original parting of the Naga ancestors from their creator. The chant concludes with the hope that the ancestor will be reunited with the creator and help to heal the wounds of the past.
'I don't know if the process of repatriation will do the healing for us,' Kikon said. 'But I do know there's a lot of trauma and we need the healing.'
This article originally appeared in
