[England / Naga People] - The Curatorial Self Keeps the Dead Body as an Object, Proving the Illusion of Ownership Over the Ancestors of the Other

Event Baseline: An English museum announced it will return skeletal remains of Indigenous Naga people, collected during the colonial era, to their community. The repatriation follows years of formal requests.

The colonial mind, driven by the belief in its own superiority, took the bodies of the other as specimens. Thought reduced living ancestors to museum objects, storing them under the illusion of scientific knowledge. The institution held onto these remains for decades, treating the other's dead as property.

The decision to return them does not erase the original violence. It only reveals that the modern institution still sees itself as the legitimate owner who can choose to release its plunder. The illusion of possession over the dead is a profound failure to see that the body is not separate from the community or the land.

This is the same mechanical pattern: the self accumulates objects to confirm its own existence. Whether it is land, resources, or bones, the act of collection is a flight from the fact of interconnection. Until the mind sees that it cannot own another being, it will continue to desecrate what it pretends to honour.