France has not formally agreed to return ancestral Hawaiian remains held in Paris. In January 2025, the U.S. Department of the Interior asked France’s Ministry of Culture to return 27 sets of remains and six casts, busts and molds. Museum officials have located 26 sets, and French authorities have asked the Office of Hawaiian Affairs to strengthen its evidence about the remains’ age, according to Honolulu Civil Beat.
A new legal route, with limits
A 2023 French law established a process for returning qualifying human remains, but it applies to requests from foreign states, not France’s overseas territories, France 24 reported. The process has been used in a case involving Madagascar: a 2025 decree ordered three skulls returned within a year, in what The Art Newspaper described as the law’s first action.
The Hawaiian request followed years of discussion. OHA made its first inquiry in 2017 to the National Museum of Natural History, the parent institution of the Musée de l’Homme. After a 2022 discussion with museum administration, senior collections director Christine Lefèvre told OHA there was no legal path to return the remains at that time, Civil Beat reported.
Evidence and the October visit
The remains were collected in the 1870s by Pierre Étienne Théodore Baillieu, then French consul to the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, and taken to Europe. Physical anthropologist Michael Pietrusewsky of the University of Hawaiʻi examined historical records and the remains and assessed that they were likely less than 500 years old. Kamakana Ferreira, an OHA compliance archaeologist, hopes to develop the age evidence without invasive testing, according to Civil Beat.
During an October visit to the Musée de l’Homme, representatives of OHA, the U.S. Department of the Interior and Hui Iwi Kuamoʻo were not allowed to view the remains. OHA said it had notified France’s Ministry of Culture six months beforehand; museum representatives said they had not received enough notice to arrange a suitable space, Civil Beat reported. After Interior delegation members sought help from the U.S. Embassy in Paris, the embassy arranged for the group to enter the building, but the remains stayed in archival boxes on another floor. The delegation held a mihi ceremony of chanting and genealogy inside the museum.
Ferreira told Civil Beat that viewing remains had generally been possible during OHA’s prior repatriation requests elsewhere. Hailama Farden, OHA’s senior director of Hawaiian cultural affairs, objected to the museum’s making images of the ancestors without permission and said museum representatives did not understand their sacred significance. The museum described the meeting as positive and constructive and said the repatriation process was underway, according to the outlet.
