The headlines write themselves. A century after British colonial expeditions plundered indigenous burial sites, the prestigious halls of Oxford University are finally extending an olive branch. Skulls and human remains taken from the Naga hills are packed into crates, labelled with academic care, and shipped back to their ancestral soil. The media calls it a monumental victory for decolonisation. Liberal commentators weep tears of vindication on social media.
Everyone loves a neat, tidy restitution story. It makes a comfortable narrative arc where the villains of yesterday gracefully redeem themselves today.
It is also an elaborate smokescreen.
If you think handing back old bones fixes a century of institutional looting, you are falling for the oldest public relations trick in the book. This isn’t a moral awakening. It is a calculated corporate reputation management strategy designed to distract you from the fact that Western academic institutions still hold absolute ownership over the intellectual property, capital, and geopolitical leverage they accumulated through imperial violence.
The Mechanics of Institutional Image Laundering
Let us look at the math of repatriation. Skulls cost nothing to ship. Human remains sitting in the Pitt Rivers Museum basement generate zero interest revenue, tie up storage insurance, and serve as a constant legal and moral liability. Every year those ancestral bones sit in Oxford, they represent an active lawsuit waiting to happen, a hostile protest brewing on campus, and an awkward footnote on donor gala brochures.
By handing them back, Oxford offloads a liability and buys decades of positive press coverage for the price of a freight ticket.
I have watched corporate entities and elite institutions execute this playbook for years. When public pressure reaches a boiling point, you sacrifice the dead weight to protect the living core. You give up the physical artifacts—the bones, the pots, the ceremonial spears—while retaining total control over the archives, the digital scans, the anthropological papers, and the narrative framework that defines who gets to study history.
Nobody is handing back the endowment funds built on stolen extraction. Nobody is decentralising the academic publishing cartels that gatekeep indigenous histories behind paywalls. You get your ancestors back in a wooden box, while Oxford keeps the keys to the entire knowledge economy.
The False Comfort of the Empty Box
What happens the day after the repatriation ceremony concludes? The local politicians cut their ribbons, the cameras stop rolling, and the descendants are left staring at a wooden crate. Does this bring back the social structures shattered by colonial imposition? Does it reverse the multi-generational erosion of indigenous languages? Does it dismantle the modern administrative borders that still slice through Naga territory today?
Of course not. But it gives the perpetrators a clean conscience.
Western institutions use repatriation as a cheap absolution ritual. It is the secular equivalent of buying an indulgence. Hand over the bones, wipe the ledger clean, and return to business as usual. It tells the world: "Look how ethical we are. We fixed the past."
Except the past isn't fixed. The past is structurally locked into the present.
Imagine a scenario where a multinational corporation pollutes a local water supply for fifty years, gives you back a clean bucket of water on the final day, and demands applause for their environmental stewardship. That is what institutional repatriation looks like when divorced from material restitution and structural reform.
Why Real Decolonisation Terrifies Academia
True decolonisation requires redistribution of power, not just distribution of dust.
If Oxford genuinely wanted to right the wrongs of the British Empire, the university would do something that actually hurts. They would liquidate a portion of their multi-billion pound endowment to fund independent, indigenous-run research centres in Nagaland. They would hand over unconditional, non-exclusive rights to every digital archive, photograph, and field note gathered during the colonial raids. They would stop acting as the gatekeepers of human history and start acting as servants to the communities they looted.
Instead, they hand over skulls and host a polite tea party.
The media plays along because complexity doesn't get clicks. A story about a repatriation ceremony fits nicely into the 24-hour news cycle. It features heroes, villains, and a touching resolution. It allows armchair activists to feel like they witnessed history without having to sacrifice a single luxury or challenge a single structural inequality in their own backyards.
The Danger of Gratitude
The most insidious part of this dynamic is the demand for gratitude.
When an elite institution like Oxford deigns to return stolen human remains, the unwritten rule is that the victims must say thank you. They must bow their heads, express deep appreciation for the university's newfound "sensitivity," and praise the administrators for doing the bare minimum required by basic human decency.
This turns theft into charity. It frames the return of stolen property as a gift rather than an overdue correction.
We need to stop praising institutions for cleaning up their own messes on their own terms. When a thief drops your wallet on the sidewalk while running from the police, you don't thank them for their generosity; you chase them down for the rest of your cash.
The Naga ancestral remains belong home. That is not up for debate. But let’s stop pretending that returning them is an act of radical justice. It is administrative housekeeping wrapped in a marketing campaign. Until Oxford and its peers are willing to surrender their institutional supremacy and pay the full moral and financial debt of empire, every repatriation ceremony is just a PR stunt designed to keep the status quo alive.
