Chile’s National Museum of Natural History on Monday said that it would return to Easter Island an enormous stone statue taken from the Rapa Nui and brought to the mainland 150 years ago.
The monolith is one of hundreds, called Moai, carved by the Rapa Nui in honor of their ancestors and sometimes referred to as the Easter Island heads.
The statues are today the island’s greatest tourist attraction, sculpted from basalt more than 1,000 years ago.
Photo: AFP / Colombian Armed Forces
The one being returned, dubbed Moai Tau, is a 715kg giant brought by the Chilean navy about 3,700km across the Pacific in 1870.
Eight years later, it was moved to the natural history museum to be displayed.
The Rapa Nui, for whom the Moai represent the spirits of their ancestors, have been asking for the statue’s return for years — as well as other cultural treasures taken from their island.
Photo: AFP / Colombian Armed Forces
“For the Rapa Nui, their ancestors, funerary objects and ceremonial materials may be as alive as members of their communities themselves,” a museum statement said.
The return of the monolith “is profoundly significant as a gesture towards our indigenous peoples,” curator Cristian Becker said.
With delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the statue is finally to depart from the port of Valparaiso on Monday next week on a trip of about five days to Easter Island “after a complex technical and diagnostic process” to guarantee its structural integrity, the museum said.
A traditional ceremony was held at the museum on Monday to send the statue safely on its way.
“It is essential that the Moai return to my homeland. For them [the community] and for me, this day is very much awaited,” said Veronica Tuqui, a Rapa Nui representative.
The Moai is to be exhibited at the Father Sebastian Englert Anthropological Museum on Easter Island.
The Rapa Nui community has also asked the British Museum in London to return another Moai, dubbed Hoa Hakananai’a, that was taken in 1868 from Orongo, a ceremonial village on Easter Island.
The Rapa Nui in 2017 gained self-administration over their ancestral lands on Easter Island, a special territory of Chile.
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