Oxford museum returns 39 Naga ancestors after 80 years, ending colonial chapter

For eighty years, the bones of thirty-nine Naga ancestors rested not in the soil of their homeland but in the glass cases of an Oxford museum, catalogued as specimens of a people deemed lesser by the empire that took them. Now, after six years of deliberate negotiation and community-led reckoning, the Pitt Rivers Museum has announced their return to Nagaland — a moment that speaks not only to the weight of colonial theft but to the enduring human need to bury one's dead with dignity. The repatriation, set to conclude with a traditional ceremony in Kohima before year's end, is less a museum pol