Human remains in museum depots force Swiss to confront colonial legacy

Coming to terms with its colonial past: the Natural History Museum in Basel. Keystone / Georgios Kefalas

Canton Basel City is returning the remains of three Indigenous people to Chile. For the Kawésqar community, it is an act of dignity and healing. For Switzerland, it is just the beginning: its museums hold at least 4,000 human remains from the colonial era.

“Today, we want to apologise to you,” said Basil Thürig, co-director of the Basel Natural History Museum, during a ceremony marking the return of the remains of three people of Kawésqar origins to their descendants.

These remains were once used for race research that turned human beings into objects of study and helped legitimise racist hierarchies and colonial violence, Thürig said. Canton Basel City has now distanced itself from this past.

It is an apology for a past “for which none of those present today bears direct responsibility”, said Francisco González, the head of the Pueblo Kawésqar Foundation and the driving force behind the negotiations that led to the return of the remains. At the ceremony, held on September 10 in the cantonal parliament, he was accompanied by ten members of his Indigenous community.

Basil Thüring, Co-Director of the Basel Natural History Museum, alongside Francisco González Álvarez, President of the Fundación Pueblo Kawésqar, and District President Conradin Cramer (from left to right)._ Patricia Islas, SWI swissinfo.ch

Healing does not mean making demands or protesting against those who committed the acts, González said. “Neither we nor the Swiss of today have lived through this process. But we are the heirs of a history that connects us. And that is precisely what we are doing with this initiative: we are inviting people to remember – but to remember in order to heal.”

A student’s discovery

A student researching the collections of the Natural History Museum Basel came across the remains of Kawésqar ancestors and alerted the Chilean foundation to their existence.

Investigations show that the remains comprise the skull of a male individual, probably from Tierra del Fuego, as well as two complete skeletons: those of a man who died aged 35-40 and a woman who lived to about 18. The skeletons had been removed together from a burial site on Santa Inés Island.

According to provenance research, the human remains were acquired in Punta Arenas between 1909 and 1914 by two men from Basel: Arnold Masarey (1883-1951), a physician and naturalist, and Ludwig Paravicini (1868-1953), a stockbroker and collector. Both were in contact with Fritz Sarasin (1859-1942), the head of the anthropological collection at what was then the Museum of Ethnology, and sent him the ancestral remains.

A 1914 letter from Paravicini to Sarasin states that a German man had witnessed the burial of the two deceased people. He later removed the bodies from the grave and “boiled them piece by piece in his own cooking utensils”. The letter also records that Paravicini bought the remains of both individuals from the man.

In summer 2024, Basel had already returned the remains of 42 Vedda people to Sri Lanka. It was one of the first major restitutions of human remains by a Swiss museum.

Switzerland nevertheless still holds more than 4,000 human remains of unclear or inadequately documented provenance, according to a 2025 reportExternal link by the University of Lausanne. Most of these bones and skeletons are held in collections in Basel and Zurich.

A colonial hub

While human remains in the museums of former colonial powers generally came from their former colonies, Swiss collections contain remains from almost every region of the world. According to researchers at the University of Lausanne, this shows how Switzerland was institutionally intertwined with the major colonial empires of its time.

Although Switzerland never had formal colonies, its research, collecting and conservation institutions have, since the colonial era, often served as hubs for the international exchange of objects, data and scientific theories. Bernhard C. Schär, Fabio Rossinelli and Ahmet Köken argue in their report that this history has so far been insufficiently researched.

The authors have recommended that the culture ministry significantly expand and make more visible its support for provenance research into human remains. They also propose creating a publicly accessible platform where communities of origin can easily find out whether the remains of their ancestors are held in Swiss collections.

In 2007 the UN General Assembly reaffirmed the right of Indigenous peoples to access the remains of their ancestors and to determine how they should be returned.

Basel takes the lead

The Basel Natural History Museum is taking this approach. It has published its provenance listExternal link of human remains from colonial contexts online. Its anthropological collection contains the remains of more than 1,500 individuals, including from Egypt (30), Peru (30), Sri Lanka (55) and Indonesia (203).

“For Basel City and for our museums, it is part of our responsibility to examine the origins of our collections. And where things were done a century or even longer ago that we can no longer understand or regard as ethical, we must draw the consequences,” Conradin Cramer, president of the Basel City cantonal government, told Swissinfo.

The canton should live up to its responsibility for cultural heritage, he said. This will, among other benefits, help prevent potential reputational damage resulting from an opaque approachExternal link to objects with problematic histories, he added.

“Basel City is the first canton in Switzerland with a legal basis requiring state museums to investigate the provenance of their collections. But laws alone are not enough. The necessary financial resources are also needed,” Cramer said.

The Basel City government has once again asked the cantonal parliament to approve CHF4 million ($4.8 million) to continue provenance research in the region’s museums. As was the case for the 2023-2026 periodExternal link, funding should be available for the years 2027 to 2030.

A new chapter

For González at the Pueblo Kawésqar Foundation, it is clear that “restitution is not the end point of a tragedy, but the beginning of a historic reconciliation”.

This new chapter in the return of human remains holds up an uncomfortable but necessary mirror to Switzerland. Although Switzerland never possessed overseas colonies of its own, numerous historians argue that Swiss scientists, merchants, collectors and museums played an active role in global colonial networks. The return of these three ancestors to the Patagonian region is therefore more than a symbolic act. It also reflects a growing willingness among Swiss institutions to critically examine their own past.

The remains are now on their way to the far south of the Americas. A ceremony is planned in Punta Arenas in OctoberExternal link.

In 2010 another particularly painful chapter in this history was brought to a close when the remains of five Kawésqar people were returned to Chile.

The five people were abducted in 1881 by a German businessman to be exhibited in so-called human exhibitions, or “human zoos”, in various European cities.

How Switzerland compares with the rest of Europe

Switzerland is not among the European pioneers when it comes to returning human remains and cultural objects from colonial contexts. Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium have launched larger restitution programmes in recent years. Austria is also working on a legal framework for the return of objects from colonial contexts.

This leaves Switzerland facing the same question as many other European countries: how should collections assembled under colonial power structures be handled, and what are the responsibilities of the institutions that hold them now?

Edited by Marc Leutenegger. Adapted from German by Catherine Hickley/ts