Cultural Restitution

June 12, 2023
NEW ZEALAND
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NEW ZEALAND

Updated April 2025

Below is a schedule of successful restitutions made to New Zealand, together with other restitution news.

Entries are updated regularly



April 2025

A precious taonga, made between 1900 & 1908 and collected by an American Mormon missionary in the early 1900s, has been returned from a private collection in Los Angeles to New Zealand

Tepapa.govt.nz


September 2024

Fourteen ancient bronze and stone sculptures are being returned by a private collection in New Zealand to the Republic of Yemen after study and cataloguing by New York's Metropolitan Museum

The Art Newspaper


June 2023

A delegation from New Zealand arrived in Germany last month tasked with repatriating around 100 Maori and Moriori remains across six cities

abc.net.au


July 2022

London's Natural History Museum participates in the largest ever repatriation of human remains by returning the skeletal remains of more than 100 ancestors of the Rekohu tribe to New Zealand

The Guardian


 



More News

Cambridge University’s transfer of legal title of Benin artefacts to Nigeria may lead others to do the same

February 14, 2026
This week’s announcement that Cambridge University has transferred legal ownership of its collection of 116 Benin artefacts to Nigeria could be hugely significant

DCMS will review its exclusion of national collections from returning cultural objects on moral grounds

February 4, 2026
Britain’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport has confirmed it will review the exclusion it imposed on national collections that prevents them from returning cultural objects on moral grounds

University of Edinburgh returns six Native American skulls to Muscogee Nation

January 30, 2026
Six Native American skulls, acquired to advance the pseudoscience of phrenology, have been returned by the University of Edinburgh to the Muscogee Nation, a self-governed Native American Tribal Nation