On Friday 23 January, the University of Edinburgh held a formal ceremony to return Muscogee tribe remains to the United States.
150 years after they were taken, six people’s skulls were returned in what is believed to be the first ever international repatriation of ancestral remains to mainland US.
The skulls belonged to the Edinburgh Phrenological Society, having been gifted by Professor W Byrd Powell, an American physician who studied Native American skulls, in 1858. When the Phrenological Society shut in the 1880s, the Muscogee skulls were transferred to the University’s Department of Anatomy.
The Muscogee are the fourth largest recognised Native American tribe in the United States.
The dominant group across the Southeastern land before European contact in 1539, the tribe were forcibly removed from their historical homelands during the Trail of Tears in the 1830s and moved to what is now Oklahoma.
Phrenology is a 19th century pseudo-science which claims that physical properties of the skull could determine character traits and mental abilities—returning the skulls thus acknowledges the harm caused by phrenology’s racist theories and practices.
The Principle Chief of the Muscogee, David Hill, spoke of the “tremendous honour and respect from our friends at the University of Edinburgh.”
He also called out institutions in the United States for not offering the same “dignity and decency.”
The university’s first repatriation was 75 years ago. In 2025, they claim to have carried out “one of the most ambitious and wide-ranging academically-led examinations of history and race” in the UK.
This exposed uncomfortable accounts of its historical ties to slavery, colonialism, and racialist sciences, resulting in a larger “decolonisation” push by the university.
The Race Review proposes long-term commitment to racial equality and justice. Its co-leader, Tommy Curry, believes that this research project can act as a model for investigating racial legacies in higher education in the UK.
However, the project has not been without criticism, as the Edinburgh University Staff 4 Free Speech claim that the University of Edinburgh’s Vice Principal Peter Mathieson is using the study to deflect from current relationships which support modern day human exploitation.
Image by Max Brown for The Student