Two pou - ornate carvings - that have been in the South Australian Museum's collection for more than 130 years are now destined for New Zealand after a ceremony in Adelaide on Tuesday.
Museums hold thousands of ‘things’ from all around the world. In larger institutions like Te Papa, the histories of these ‘things’ are not always known. This blog is looking at ways to start recovering these lost stories and histories.
Te Papa collection manager and kaitiaki taonga Moana Parata brings home a precious taonga, a raranga vest collected by Carl Freeze, an American Mormon missionary in the early 1900s.
Argentina has one of the most important and sensitive bioanthropological collections in Latin America. Most of the remains in museums come from Tehuelche and Mapuche victims of the so-called "Conquest of the Desert". However...
In the late 1800s, Andreas Reischek, an Austrian scientist, robbed Māori graves and plundered Māori artefacts for his private collection. More than 140 years later, officials of the Austrian government have been repatriating what Reischek looted.
During a solemn ceremony at the GRASSI Museum für Völkerkunde zu Leipzig, ancestral remains, which had been in the possession of the Staatliche Ethnographische Sammlungen Sachsen (SES), were returned to representatives of their Māori (New Zealand) und Moriori (Chatham Islands) communities of origin.
Known only as A01392 in the records of the Grassi Museum in Saxony, now the life mask of a Ngāti Toa tupuna has returned to his whenua and people as a taonga.
The wars of 1845–72 were described by James Belich as ‘bitter and bloody struggles, as important to New Zealand as were the Civil Wars to England and the United States’. The conflict’s themes of land and sovereignty continue to resonate today.
