Auckland War Memorial Museum to return Maori body parts

The Auckland War Memorial Museum aims to return all the Maori ancestral remains that it houses to their tribes by the middle of next year.

Paul Tapsell, head of the museum's Maori values team, said displaying or keeping ancestral remains was no longer appropriate and caused great pain.

Remains are toi moko (preserved tattooed heads) and skeletal parts - some of them taken from burial caves and sold to the museum.

They made Maori feel as though they were walking into a cemetery when they entered the museum doors, said Dr Tapsell.

The return programme involves consulting about 50 communities whose ancestors were identified among unmodified remains held in the museum since the 19th century.

"Without exception, iwi said they would like to quietly have the remains come home," said Dr Tapsell. "It's an opportunity to right a wrong."

He said the trust board of the 155-year-old museum took the advice of its taumata (advisory) iwi that returning the remains would show Maori communities that the museum was serious about wanting to build a solid relationship.

The museum, through the returns, was beginning to re-establish relationships compromised by 19th-century collecting for scientific study.

"Completion [of the return programme] will spiritually release the museum from its darker past and make it a culturally acceptable institution for all visitors, especially Maori," say Dr Tapsell and taumata iwi chairman Danny Tumahai in the museum's new draft annual plan.

This month, the museum withdrew a display of empty 200-year-old Maori burial caskets after Ngati Hine in Northland protested about their ownership and cultural insensitivity.

About 90 per cent of the remains had been identified, helped by meticulous record-keeping of a curator of the 1920s.

It was up to the communities to choose whether remains should be used for scientific purposes, such as exploring the DNA of ancestors.

The Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa, said it supported the Auckland museum's efforts.

Te Papa Maori strategy director James Te Puni said Te Papa had inherited a lot of ancestral remains from the former National Museum and was also trying to repatriate Maori and Moriori remains held in about 200 institutions overseas.

In the past three years ancestral remains had been repatriated from overseas and held temporarily at Te Papa while research went on to find where they came from.

Last November, the museum repatriated 18 ancestral remains from eight institutions in three countries and the month before, remains from three institutions in Melbourne.

Mr Te Puni said the museum had returned remains to six iwi, including Northland's Te Kuri, Whanganui iwi and Ngai Tahu of the South Island.

He had no figure for how much Maori ancestral remains were in the care of museums in New Zealand.

But he said it was likely that research would not be able to establish where all the remains came from.