Macabre

In August, the National Museum of the Philippines welcomed the initiative of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in the US to bring home the remains of Filipinos in their collection for years.

The move comes after The Washington Post reported that the US museum had at least 30,700 human bones and other parts, including 255 brains, from at least 10 foreign countries, including the Philippines.

The Post reported that the controversial collection included four brains which belonged to Filipinos, mostly members of various Philippine indigenous groups brought to the US for the St. Louis World Fair 1904, and the brains of 23 other Filipinos.

As a matter of fact, colonizers bringing home indigenous and foreign human bones, brains and other parts during the colonial period and the Age of Discovery was not uncommon.

These collections most often would later be stored in academic institutions and museums for research and exhibitions.

Phrenology was a pseudoscience widespread and practiced in the 19th century in the Western world that involved judging a person's character by the bumps on his skull.

Historian Dr. James Poskett noted that phrenology found supporters right across the US in the 19th century, and particularly among southern plantation owners.

According to phrenologists at the time, Africans had small intellectual organs, which provided a justification for slavery.

Most disturbingly, skulls of murdered slaves were even sold to phrenological collectors.

Spanish newspaper El País reported in 2020 that the 19th-century naturalist Domingo Sánchez spent 13 years in the Philippines, sending back animal and human samples to build up museum collections and exhibitions in Spain.

Sánchez arrived in the Philippines in 1885 and went back to Spain in 1898 after the Philippine Revolution ended the 333-year colonial rule of Spain.

The naturalist recounted in his memoirs a 1890 expedition to rob bodies from the Tagbanwa in Palawan:

"I was not unaware that what I was trying to do represented the greatest of crimes for those poor people. The desecration of their graves, the desecration of their dead, was the biggest offense imaginable against them, but the benevolent, compassionate man had left my body. Only the naturalist was left behind and, to him, obtaining those samples deserved some sort of sacrifice."

The National Museum of Anthropology in Madrid still stores nearly 40 human skulls sent by Sánchez while the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris keeps 18,000 human skulls, the Penn Museum in the US owns a collection of around 1,300 skulls. The Anatomical Museum at the University of Edinburgh still holds over 1,800 skulls.

On 3 November, four tribal warrior skulls were returned to Taiwan by the University of Edinburgh nearly 150 years after their deaths. This marks a first-of-its-kind repatriation of human remains to Taiwan.

The Paiwan tribesmen were among those killed during a Japanese invasion of southern Taiwan during an 1874 punitive expedition known as the Mudan Incident, which was launched in response to the massacre of 54 shipwrecked Ryukyuan sailors by Paiwan warriors three years earlier.

The skulls were thought to have been originally taken as war trophies by Japanese soldiers and eventually reached Edinburgh in 1907 after being given to the University's then Principal William Turner.

The Paiwan people are approximately 18 percent of Taiwan's total indigenous population, making them the second-largest indigenous group.

Many Austronesian Taiwanese have similar vocabulary as dialects spoken in the Philippines, such as ina (mother) for Amis, as well as Puyuma, people. The Paiwans call their mothers "kina"; Kavalans call mothers "tina"; Bunun, "cina".

Civur Malili, a Paiwan shaman went to Edinburgh with the Taiwanese delegation, communicated with both the spirits of the skulls and the Paiwan sun deity Qadaw at the ceremony on 3 November.

Malili said the four warriors initially were hesitant about returning to Taiwan, because they had died in unnatural circumstances and could bring their descendants bad luck, according to Paiwan beliefs.

But ultimately, the spirits of four warriors were persuaded and agreed to go home.