Alistair Hardaker | Image: Muscogee Repatriation Ceremony (Neil Hanna)
University returns six Muscogee Nation skulls after 150 years in what is believed to be first such repatriation to mainland United States.
The University of Edinburgh has completed what is believed to be the first international repatriation of ancestral remains to mainland United States, returning the skulls of six people from the Muscogee (Creek) Nation more than 150 years after they were taken.
The remains were handed over during a formal ceremony in Edinburgh on 23 January. The Muscogee (Creek) Nation, now based in Oklahoma, is the fourth largest federally recognised tribe in the US with approximately 103,000 people. The nation’s Department of Culture and Humanities will formally repatriate the remains to the tribe’s original homelands in the Southeastern United States.
The six skulls were originally held in the Edinburgh Phrenological Society’s museum until the 1880s, when items were transferred to the university’s Department of Anatomy. The remains were acquired sometime before 1858 and given to the society by Professor W Byrd Powell, an American physician who studied Native American skulls as part of phrenology, a discredited 19th century pseudoscience that formulated racist theories of inferiority based on skull measurements.
David Hill, Principal Chief of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation: “We have been blessed with a tremendous honor and respect from our friends at the University of Edinburgh with the return of these ancestral remains. What makes this occasion even more special and meaningful for us is that we had to travel over 4,000 miles and cross an ocean to receive the kind of dignity and decency that we still cannot find here at home.
“We can only hope that this incredible gesture by the University of Edinburgh will inspire these institutions to do the same, and move these continuing injustices in the right direction and on the right side of history.”
Professor Tom Gillingwater, Chair of Anatomy at the University of Edinburgh, added: “Caring for and addressing the history of our collections is a key responsibility for the University and repatriations play a central role in this work.
“I am honoured to have been able to play a part in returning these ancestral remains to the Muscogee Nation.”
The university’s Anatomical Museum cares for approximately 1,000 items that once belonged to the Phrenological Society.
The university’s first repatriation took place more than 75 years ago and is widely considered the first such activity in Scotland. Most recently in 2025, the skulls of three Indigenous Ainu people were returned to their community in Japan.
