Ancestral Remains Returned: University of Edinburgh Repatriates Muscogee Ancestors After 150 Years

Описание: Ancestral remains of the Muscogee Creek Nation and Euchee people have been returned to their homelands after spending more than a century in a University of Edinburgh collection. A repatriation effort that both the tribes and the university say reflects a growing push to correct historical wrongs.

The remains, collected in the mid-1800s during the rise of a now-debunked pseudoscience, were formally returned following collaboration between tribal representatives and the university’s anatomy department.

How the Remains Reached Scotland?

According to Tom Gillingwater, Professor of Anatomy at the University of Edinburgh, the remains were part of a much larger historical collection assembled during the 17th through 19th centuries.

"People were undertaking studies of human skulls for what’s called comparative purposes," Gillingwater said. "Comparing skulls from some people to other people and seeing if they could kind of deduce anything scientific about it...it was all fully debunked later, thank goodness."

Comparing human skulls was known as the study of phrenology, a 19th-century theory claiming the shape of the skull revealed character traits, and Edinburgh was once a major center of that movement.

The six skulls of ancestors from the University of Edinburgh—one female and five males—have now been returned to Muscogee homelands in Georgia. Tribal leaders plan to rebury them privately in a natural setting.

"Unfortunately, we don’t know the names of any of the individuals,” Butler said. “It's time to heal. It’s all of our responsibility to correct what happened in the past. And to make it right by letting them go back to rest, letting us rebury them so that they can go back into the earth."