Easter Island’s indigenous people have asked Chile’s government to help them recover a unique Moai statue removed 150 years ago and now kept in the British Museum in London.
The seven-foot-tall (2.4-metre) Hoa Hakananai’a sculpture was removed from the island by Richard Powell, captain of HMS Topaze, in 1868 and given to Queen Victoria, who donated it to the museum in 1869.
“It’s a unique piece, the only tangible link that accounts for two important stages in our ancestral history,” the island’s Rapa Nui authorities said on Tuesday.
Of the more than 900 giant humanoid sculptures on the island, most were carved from volcanic ash between the sixth and 17th centuries, but the Hoa Hakananai’a, which means “the stolen or hidden friend” in the Rapa Nui language, is unique as it was made from basalt.
Figures associated with the Tangata Manu (“bird man”) cult were carved on its back.
This request “seems appropriate given the new coordination and conservation functions being carried out on the island with regards the Moai,” said Felipe Ward, Chile’s national treasures minister.
Since December, the Rapa Nui have taken over the conservation, preservation and management of their archeological heritage.
Part of that involves the attempted recovery of priceless artefacts they say were illegally taken, including another Moai residing in the Quai Branly museum in Paris.
The Rapa Nui believe that the spiritual force which protects them resides in Moai and other sacred objects.
Recovering stolen statues would also be “an important symbol in closing the sad chapter of violation of our rights by European navigators” that visited the island in the 19th century, local leaders said.
Easter Island is a Unesco world heritage site about 2,000 miles (3,700km) off the coast of Chile, and whose indigenous inhabitants are a Polynesian people closely related to those in Tahiti.
The Pacific Ocean island was first recorded by European navigators in 1722 and visited several times, including by the Briton James Cook, before it was annexed by Chile in 1888.
By then, much of its population had been decimated by European diseases such as smallpox, or carted off into slavery.
Chile recently announced measures to limit the time tourists can stay on the island and the number of non-Rapa Nui mainlanders allowed to settle there.
