Edinburgh museum returns human skull to Hawaii

The Surgeons Museum in Edinburgh has this morning (May 4) taken part in a ceremony to repatriate a human skull to Hawaii.

The museum was approached by the Office of Hawaiian affairs in 2020 to have the remains returned.

The skull was originally donated to the museum in 1896 by it's former President Sir John Struthers.

From the beginning of Struthers’ teaching career, he actively encouraged his students when working or traveling abroad to collect human remain specimens for the study of the ‘different races of man’.

This process of collecting most often included theft, removing human remains without the consent of the community or relatives. These remains were then sent back to Struthers for his own collection and research.

The Kingdom of Hawai‘i introduced a law which made it illegal to remove human remains without consent in 1860. While the museum has not been able to ascertain exactly when this skull was removed, given Struthers’ teaching timeline, it is most likely to have come after this date. Making the removal not only ethically and morally questionable but also very much illegal.

“Iwi kupuna sit at the core of Hawaiian's connection to ancestry that strengthens and guides our understanding and interaction with our homeland, and with one another,” said OHA Board Chair Carmen “Hulu” Lindsey.

We spoke earlier to Museum Curator Louise Wilkie who told us:

"It's really important to them. And the whole experience has been really positive for us as well, a chance to look back at our past.

"For them, it's really about bringing their ancestors home, their family home. And we were delighted to take part in that.

"Repatriation can be quite complicated. In this case Hawaii made it very easy for us and quite beautiful experience, actually very positive is our first repatriation that we've ever done as the museum, but because it came from a government organisation representing the community, it was quite straightforward in the end."

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