Repatriating ancestral bones is not the answer

As per reports the Pitt Rivers Museum (PRM) in Oxford has decided that it’s NOW ‘insensitive’ to exhibit the remains of 213 Naga bones, and other indigenous artefacts from around the globe. PRM was founded in 1884, and it’s safe to assume that the Naga bones and other artefacts are more than 100 years old.

The simmering question is how did the exhibit become ‘insensitive’ after a century of display? The answer lies in the arrival of the ‘cancel culture’ or the Woke culture.

Wokes are basically anti-history, anti-establishment, anti-religion, leftists, anarchists and Pro-LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer). Fighting trans rights (men identifying themselves as women and vice-versa) to cancelling history are the new crusades for these overwhelmingly white and college educated Wokes – and unbearably intolerant.

Wokes do not believe in free speech. The celebrated author JK Rowling has been harassed, trolled, bullied, threatened with death, stared and shouted down for her stand that it’s unfair for trans men to compete with women in sports. In short she has been ‘cancelled.’

Wokes in America went on a statue pulling spree in 2020 and 2021. Under pressure, the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee was pulled down by the Governor of Virginia. Wokes in Bristol City, England, gleefully pulled down the statue of Edward Colston (1636-1721), a Tory Politician from eons ago. He was ‘cancelled’ on charges of ‘profiting’ from the slave trade. Wokes have also identified 84 more statues all across England and Wales to be pulled down.

Sports is Woke battlefield. Due to Woke protests, the Washington Redskin, a top football franchise or club, changed its name to Washington Commanders! To “decolonise” their history, Wokes are now targeting the two richest football clubs in the English Premier League, Manchester United and Manchester City. The two clubs are under pressure to remove their iconic “three-mast ship” from the clubs’ badges over the clubs’ imagined ‘slavery links’ in the 19th century. The most compelling discourse in America today garnering prime time TV debate is the case of Lia Thomas, a trans-gender swimmer (formerly William Thomas), who has won almost all the competition in women’s swimming.

Woke city councilors in San Francisco are in the final stages of doling out 5 million US dollars to every black citizen in the city to ‘atone for centuries of slavery and systemic racism.’
Hollywood star Ryan Reynolds and his wife had to profusely apologise and make handsome ‘charitable’ donations to various black organisations after Wokes pointed out the resort where they had planned to engage/marry was built on slave labour.

According to the notoriously anti-Woke columnist Piers Morgan, “A very tiny but vocal woke brigade are trying to suck all the joy out of life & cancel everyone that doesn’t share their absurd worldview.”

Given the toxic atmosphere PRM Oxford has reasons to be afraid of being ‘cancelled.’ Or better still the museum curators themselves have gone Woke! The travesty of our times is to be labelled racists for keeping skulls and bones in a museum, and being ‘cancelled’ for saying boys and girls instead of their so-called proper ‘gender-neutral pronouns.’

This is not to belittle our Naga anthropologists and scholars linked with the repatriation project who have enlightened us much with their work.

However any intellectual discourse/exercise needs to be gauged against a value system. For instance, Dr Salome ZhimomiAMP propounded that “The concept of trauma with the removal of headhunted skull is not part of any Naga cultural narrative, past or present…,” and this is a fact. Secondly, the notion of “decolonisation” is inextricably linked with Wokeness – in that both seek to right a wronged past, whether real or imagined, and therein lies the rub. While the process of decolonisation is restorative in some sense (which Woke is not), in this case repatriating bones is no more restorative than pulling down statues.

PRM is not the problem, after all the museum is not shutting down, and if required the museum can simply stop the display of the so-called insensitive artefacts to the viewing public. The problem is our inability to move forward.

Thus in the absence of negative cultural connotations related to removal of our artefacts, the repatriation process should be stopped. As it is, artefacts are best preserved in museums with world-class infrastructures; with specialists and professionals monitoring round the clock the nuances of humidity, heat, light, chemical reactions, pest control, etc., unless of course the alternative is to bury all the repatriated artefacts in Naga soil which the Pitt Rivers Museum for all their Wokeness would be aghast to death.

~ Joel Naga