Austria to return stolen Māori and Moriori ancestral remains

Monday, 26 September 2022

European museums are replete with items brought from far-flung seas. With the tides now changing, how do the original caretakers go about bringing their treasures home? (Audio aired September 2022).

The ancestral remains of about 64 Māori and Moriori will be welcomed home to Aotearoa this weekend, marking the biggest remains repatriation from Austria.

Forty-nine sets of the remains were collected by the notorious Austrian grave-robber and taxidermist Andreas Reischek, who exhumed and stole the remains when in New Zealand for 12 years between 1877 and 1889.

Across about 1500 pages of confusing handwritten diary entries which were translated, it was discovered that Reischek boasted of eluding Māori surveillance, exploiting New Zealand, and looting tapu (sacred) places when on his travels.

The remains will be flown this week from Vienna’s Natural History Museum to Te Papa in Wellington, where a pōwhiri will be held on Sunday.

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Te Arikirangi Mamaku-Ironside, Te Papa’s acting head of repatriation.

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Dr Sabine Eggers, head of international collections at Vienna’s Natural History Museum.

They will be transported using indigenous cultural customs and protocol, and accompanied by representatives of the Government’s repatriation programme, Māori cultural experts and representatives of Austria.

The remains’ return to Aotearoa marks the end of 77 years of negotiation with Austria: the first request to repatriate them was made in 1945.

Dr Eggers presents an inventory record relating of one of the ancestral remains taken by Andreas Reischek to experts.

“There is a lot of pressure internally as well as externally [on museums] to decolonise their practices and take a more considered approach to their collections,” Te Papa’s acting head of repatriation Te Arikirangi Mamaku-Ironside said in an interview from Austria.

The repatriation was about reconciling the hurt caused to Aotearoa’s indigenous communities and facilitating a healing process, Mamaku-Ironside said.

More broadly, as repatriation became more common internationally, the process was allowing museums to take a “really hard look at themselves in the mirror”, and examine how their collections may no longer serve a purpose in contemporary society, he said.

Andreas Reischek. Making New Zealand: Negatives and prints from the Making New Zealand Centennial collection. Ref: MNZ-0300-1/4-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington.

Dr Sabine Eggers, the head of international collections at Vienna’s Natural History Museum, will accompany the remains on their journey back to Aotearoa.

Mamaku-Ironside said it was important for descendants and communities to be able to speak to Eggers about what happened to the remains, as an expression of humility from the European country.

In an interview, Eggers said Reischek knew he was doing something “completely wrong” when stealing the remains. She had previously personally written a report to Austrian authorities, explaining how the value of the remains was significantly higher for Māori and Moriori than could ever be for reasons related to science.

While Austria was not a country that colonised others, it had a colonial mindset, supported colonial powers and used colonial means to obtain artefacts, Eggers said.

It was an honour to help heal an “open wound”, she said.

The remains include skulls without mandibles, craniums, loose mandibles and maxilla fragments. Most of the 64 ancestors are thought to be stolen from the Chatham Islands, Whanganui, Christchurch, Lyttelton, Auckland and Northland.

Colonial collectors rarely recorded the origin of the remains they unlawfully took, meaning the identity and home of many may never be known.

After Sunday’s ceremony the ancestors will be held at Te Papa while provenance research is undertaken, followed by engagement with whānau, hapu and iwi to determine their final resting place.

New Zealand’s repatriation programme is tasked with locating, identifying, negotiating and physically returning kōiwi tangata (Māori skeletal remains) and kōimi tangata (Moriori skeletal remains) to New Zealand.

Since its launch in 2003, the programme has repatriated almost 800 ancestral remains.

Earlier this year Aotearoa welcomed home 111 kōimi t’chakat Moriori (Moriori skeletal remains) and two Māori ancestral remains from London's Natural History Museum.

In 2020 four toi moko (tattooed Māori heads) were returned from two separate German institutions.