William Carruthers writes:
Laying Ancestors to Rest should be welcomed. It seems likely to be successful in achieving at least one of its recommendations. Calling for a ban on the trade in human remains in Britain, as the report does, is not particularly controversial.
But returning them will be harder.
A few years ago, Laura Peers, then curator of the Americas collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, wrote about the slow, quiet and bureaucratic process of returning a single femur “collected by a missionary as a medical curiosity, from an Indigenous nation with whom I have longstanding professional and personal relationships”.
Such work is, when it happens, painstaking and careful. Even with the best of intentions, it is not a fast process
The often-halting nature of that work is likely to continue. Museum professionals – particularly newer museum professionals – know that this work has to happen and are, I would argue, in large part invested in doing it.
In a contemporary funding environment marked by almost continuous cuts, even the most dedicated staff will find their actions curtailed. They may, in some cases, be able to remove remains from display, as the report recommends (and as the Pitt Rivers Museum has done).
Progress on this issue is by no means impossible. But without real political will and without the money to back it up, a blanket approach to the display and restitution of human remains in British museums remains difficult to enforce.
