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On March 17 Friday 2023, I visited Point Hope in Alaska, in order to repatriate a human skull to the Tikigaq community. For myself, this repatriation trip was more than an opportunity to address a late professor's wrongdoing in the past. It also turned out to be a trip in which to reflect on my faith in Christ.
Back in July 1960, a late professor of Meiji university stole a skull and brought it to Japan. Since then, the skull had been boxed and stored in the university even after the late professor left school in 1973. In 1998, one of the senior faculty members found the skull and moved to it the university's museum storage, wondering where it came from and where he should return it to. 20 years later in 2018, I started working at the university not knowing the presence of the skull.
In the middle of the pandemic in 2021 when the senior faculty member took me to the museum storage and showed me the skull, he told me of his wish to properly repatriate the skull. We discussed that we would seek to repatriate the skull in person rather than mailing it in order to properly express our apology. However, we needed to wait for approximately a year until the Japanese government eased the COVID border restriction and until we secured funding for the trip. I finally got in touch with the council members of the Native Village government in Point Hope in the late summer of 2022.
Even with the terrible and questionable wrongdoing, the council members were patient with us. After several online and phone correspondences, we set my repatriation trip schedule to the middle of March 2023. In terms of repatriation, the timing of the trip would not be ideal because the ground in Point Hope would still be too frozen to rebury the skull. Working with the Native Village government, the congregation of St. Thomas Episcopal Church of Point Hope helped me to bring the skull back to the village in the middle of March by agreeing to store it in the church until the soil would be soft enough for reburial.
My visit to St. Thomas Episcopal Church also made me th ink about another crucial issue on scientific profession. My repatriation visit day coincided on the same day when the bodies of diseased locals returned to village for funerals and burials. They lived away from Point Hope and traveled back to their final resting place. In the second day ofmy stay at Point Hope, the church held funerals and burial rites for some of them. The emotional distances of the family and the community to the diseased were personal and painful. Sometimes in a pure scientific context, such emotional connection and respect to the diseased and the family can be overlooked. In some cases, human remains have rather been perceived as research subjects. Sitting in the sanctuary during the funeral and as helping burying the coffin into the frozen soil in the -40F weather, I wondered if the late professor would have stolen the skull back in 1960 if he had paid some attention to their relations to remains.
Looking back on my repatriation trip, I realized that l was primarily thinking about myself. However, the congregations and the dioceses of both sides of the Pacific patiently helped me all the way through. Instead of thinking about the frozen soil of March, I checked out the website of the Episcopal Diocese of Alaska and found the information on St. Thomas as I was wondering if I could visit any local churches and would be able to attend Eucharist during the trip. Also, I did not consider anything about the fact that the CO YID pandemic had been blocking the priest's visit to St. Thomas over the last three years. I also did not realize how difficult it had been for the community members who live away from the village to coordinate the logistics of physical return and burial in winter. On top of that, I requested a travel prayer to Reverend Nozomu Barnabas Kishimoto of St. Barnabas' Anglican/Episcopal Church at Tsuchiura due to my nervousness with the responsibility of traveling with the skull from Japan to Point Hope even though this repatriation was not a matter of the church. Instead, Reverend Kishimoto prayed over the skull and emphasized the importance of showing respect to the locals of Point Hope.
While I had initially thought that I was called to work on this repatriation when I saw the skull back in 2021, I realized that I was rather directed to depend on the love and kindness of all those across the Pacific. Again, I would like to express my appreciation to those at St. Thomas in Point Hope and at St. Barnabas in Tsuchiura for all the support throughout the repatriation.
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