Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. This chapter aims to bring together Indigenous and non-Indigenous expertise from fourteen countries to provide the reader with an international overview of scholarship about the removal and return of Indigenous Ancestral Remains. It is customary in Australia and some other countries to provide warnings so that Indigenous people do not come across photos, names or details of deceased peoples and traumatic histories unawares. In Europe, collections comprised European remains in the majority but also contained large numbers of non-European individuals as they sought to have global representation. The successful return of remains from overseas institutions and their subsequent reburial is reliant on fine-grained research to locate collections and identify where Ancestral Remains were taken from. A challenge for all scholarship concerned with documenting the history of the removal of Ancestral Remains is one that is familiar to anyone concerned with writing Indigenous histories.