ABSTRACT
On 22 August 2002, Steven Engelsman, director of Museum Volkenkunde, gave a lecture about the museum of the twenty-first century in the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in the capital Wellington. Present were Pat Stuart, director of the museum, and Arapata Hakiwai, her repatriation manager. After finishing, they asked Engelsman to come with them to a side room. There, in a tone as friendly as it was business-like, they told him that there was a Toi Moko, a tattooed Māori head, in the Leiden museum and that New Zealand did not think a Western public collection was the right place to keep it. They knew the inventory number, rmv 350-5763, and also that Museum Volkenkunde had acquired it in 1883 and retained possession of it ever since. Would it be possible to return it? The inventory number and year are in a letter of 16 September 2002 to the Leiden institution. For the New Zealanders, these heads were not museum objects but ‘the remains of ancestral figures who were entitled to maximum respect and discretion’.
