Returning Home: New Zealand Museums’ Outgoing Repatriation Practice

This thesis examines contemporary New Zealand museum repatriation practice, focusing on returns of ancestral remains and objects from New Zealand museums to source communities overseas. The literature review identified a gap in the museum studies literature for a study of outgoing repatriation that is grounded in museum practice. Utilising a Kaupapa Māori methodology and a New Zealand-oriented decolonisation lens, this research centres current professional museum practice, the ways in which it is influenced and shaped by Māori cultural practices, and the interface between policy and practice in the dynamic engagement zones of repatriation. As a Pākehā researcher, the Kaupapa Māori and decolonisation theories guided my approach to this sensitive topic.

I employ an action research-informed methodology which utilises case studies, semi-structured interviews, and policy discourse analysis of policy documents to present a snapshot of contemporary museum repatriation practice. The research centres on two recent, distinctive case studies. The first case study examines the 2018 return of ancestral remains from Canterbury and Otago museums to the people of Rapa Nui (Easter Island). The second case study examines a 2016 long-term loan from Te Papa, New Zealand to the Bishop Museum, Hawaiʻi, which became an unconditional repatriation in 2019. The returned ʻahu ʻula and mahiole, jewels in New Zealand’s national museum collection, originally belonged to Hawaiian high chief Kalaniʻōpuʻu, who gifted them to Captain James Cook in 1779.

The findings of this thesis reveal that Māori cultural practices lead museum repatriation practice in New Zealand, including how ancestors and objects are cared for, repatriation processes and ceremonies, and museum relationships with Indigenous source communities. In centring museum practice, this thesis contributes to the project of ensuring museum studies reflects museums’ operational reality. A recent survey of museum holdings and a new national repatriation policy have led to the formation of Ngākahu and the New Zealand Repatriation Research Network which bring resource-poor museum practitioners together to maximise the efficacy of their repatriation work.