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

Birmingham Museum helps shrink ‘The Elephant in the Room’

July 3, 2025
“Would be nice to have a more frank discussion about how objects are collected for the Museum. Saying ‘Donated’ is not enough”

Naga ancestral remains to be returned to their homeland

June 17, 2025
Last week, a delegation of Naga people signed a declaration that will lead to the return of 41 Naga ancestral remains currently held in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford

Campaign to repatriate Maya artefacts to Belize escalates

May 24, 2025
Village leaders at San Benito Poité in southern Belize, formerly British Honduras, are claiming that an important collection of artefacts removed from the ancient city of Pusilha is not the lawful property of the British Museum