UK university returns warrior skulls to Taiwan’s Indigenous Paiwan people | Indigenous Rights News

Edinburgh College, which was given the skulls in 1907, says the return is a part of its try to handle its colonial legacy.

The College of Edinburgh has returned the skulls of 4 Paiwan warriors to Taiwanese Indigenous leaders, practically 150 years after their deaths.

The repatriation is the primary of its sort for Taiwan, in response to the college, and comes as Edinburgh and comparable establishments throughout Europe reckon with their colonial previous.

“This repatriation is a end result of worldwide cooperation between the College and the Taiwanese neighborhood,” Professor Tom Gillingwater, chief of anatomy on the college, mentioned in an announcement.

“We’re dedicated to addressing our colonial legacy and this repatriation is the most recent motion we now have taken consistent with our longstanding coverage of returning gadgets to applicable representatives of the cultures from which they had been taken,” he mentioned.

The skulls had been returned to representatives of Taiwan’s Council of Indigenous Individuals and the top of Mudan township – a neighborhood in southern Taiwan near the place the soldiers had been killed in 1874.

The 4 Paiwan warriors had been the victims of a Japanese punitive expedition to Taiwan carried out in retaliation for the bloodbath of 54 shipwrecked sailors from the Ryukyu Islands ­in 1871.

Often known as the “Mudan Incident,” the battle helped kick-start Japan’s colonial ambitions in the direction of Taiwan, which it will annex from China’s crumbling Qing dynasty 20 years later.

The skulls had been transported as trophies to Japan by an American army adviser, after which transferred via two different homeowners earlier than they got to the college in 1907.

Edinburgh “holds one of many largest and most traditionally vital assortment of ancestral stays, notably skulls,” in response to the college.

The Paiwan are Taiwan’s second-largest Indigenous neighborhood with a inhabitants of simply over 102,000 individuals in 2020, in response to authorities figures.