‘It brings dignity to every one of them’: inside the reburial of Indigenous bones and restless spirits

Submitted by Paul Daley on Sat, 04/12/2021 - 3:30am

Stolen, collected and traded Aboriginal remains will return to their country in South Australia. This is the story of how they were taken, and those who will bring them to rest

For weeks Kaurna elders Aunty Madge Wanganeen and Uncle Major “Moogy” Sumner have been preparing the skeletal remains of their ancestors for reburial on the outskirts of Adelaide.

As the first step of what will likely be the world’s biggest mass internment of stolen and otherwise unearthed Indigenous ancestral skeletons, Wanganeen and Sumner carefully took the bones out of cardboard storage boxes at the South Australian Museum, where the remains of about 4,600 mostly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are kept.