“We hear their voices now.” The story of Yawuru’s journey to repatriate their stolen ancestors

In 2016, the Yawuru community, the Indigenous people of the country around Broome in the north of Western Australia, discovered that the bones of their ancestors had been taken from their country and placed in museum collections in Europe, Asia, and America. To date, Yawuru have located thirty two ancestors, have been found, including those collected by Hermann Klaatsch and held in the University of Breslau, Poland. Each ancestor tells a story that, collectively, reveals and confirms the harsh truths of the colonial encounter from the time of the first attempts at the settlement of Yawuru country in the 1860s to the mid-1900s. It is a story that exposes the collusion between the State, the Church, and the settlers in the further violation and dehumanisation of First Nations peoples in the northwest of Australia

Ancestor · Collusion · Colonialism · Dehumanization · Indigenous · Australian Indigenous Culture and History · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies · New Caledonia Indigenous Studies