The living cannot heal while the dead remain imprisoned.
Who decides which bodies are “objects of study” and which are humans deserving dignity?
Colonialism extended its reach into the realm of the dead, stealing our ancestors and the worlds they sustained.
The dead, who should move between realms as mediators and guides, are held in suspension, unable to return to the soil, unable to re-join the cosmologies from which they were torn.
To imprison the dead in glass cases is to violate the pathways of return.
Ancestors who once belonged to cycles of burial and mourning are instead trapped in institutions of empire.
They are in the drawers and storage rooms of museums, in university collections, in archives, dislocated from their communities and severed from ritual care.
Denied the rites that would allow them to complete their passage, our ancestors become wanderers. Suspended between worlds. Held under imperial custody.
The theft of bones is the theft of afterlives.
In the so-called halls of science, our people are made into exhibits and reduced to curiosities and trophies for the imperial gaze.
The dead are denied rest, the ancestors are denied return and the living are denied the completion of their grief.
Maasai representatives from Tanzania visiting the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, UK. (Credit: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford)
Chief Jamopoty and six other representatives of the Tupinambá de Olivença people from Brazil at Denmark’s National Museum Photograph: Tiago Rogero/The Guardian