About 150 years after they left the Marianas, the remains of four CHamoru “Matua” have arrived home following a moving ceremony March 6 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. 

About two dozen CHamorus, many of them sanlågu artists and scholars residing in the East Coast, gathered respectfully in the museum’s portrait room to send them home with a proper farewell. 

In the room were the ancestral human remains of three skulls and a mandible that were taken from the island and delivered to Austrian anthropologist Felix von Luschan around 1878.  

The museum could provide no more information about the remains beyond what was inscribed on the backs of their skulls: Chamorro, Matua, Agaña, Guahan, Ladrones. 

Pacific Island Ethnic Art Museum Director Fran Lujan prepares the remains of four CHamoru “Matua” for a ceremony in the portrait room at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Fran spent seven months coordinating the return of the remains to the island of Guam. She invited sanlågu CHamorus mostly from the New York area to witness the private and official ceremonial return. “Repatriation is a responsibility, a Sacred obligation, and a promise to honor indigenous sovereignty. As sanlågu CHamorus, together we will help carry our Ancestors home grounded in justice, healing, and self-determination,” Fran wrote in an official invitation to the ceremony. 
Copyright photo by Manny Crisostomo

While the ceremony moved some to tears, others were struck by the irony of the last description (the Spanish word for thieves), given the circumstances.   

Interviewed two days after the ceremony, Pacific Island Ethnic Art Museum Director Fran expressed gratitude for being able to play a part in their return to Guam, carefully packed away in a Pelican case and flown home with the Guam State Historic Preservation Officer Patrick Lujan.

Fran offered this personal statement, which opens with an homage to the Native Americans who welcomed their CHamoru brothers and sisters with their own ceremony outside the museum: 

"From the People of the Lenape, Anishnaabe, Oneida and Wampanoag to the People of the Deepest Ocean, beloved ancestors returned home to Guahan through rematriation March 6, 2026 — carried in sacred ceremony by CHamoru matriarchs and encircled by Indigenous Queer, Trans, and Two-Spirit artists, scholars, and culture bearers.

The ocean always remembers the way home."

The CHamoru remains were just a small part of Felix von Luschan’s personal collection of 5,000 skulls and 200 skeletons that was sold in 1924 to a trustee at the American Museum of Natural History. (Side note: This was just his personal collection. His official collection, called the S-Sammlung collection and includes 5,000 to 6,000 more skulls, is housed in a Berlin museum.) 

If you Google his name, you’ll find several articles over the years that question his collections, his acquisition methods, and the subsequent repatriations to indigenous peoples from Hawaiians to Maoris to Native Americans.  

CHamorus form a circle and chant “In Neni Hamyo” to four human remains believed to be the ancestors of the CHamoru people of the Mariana Islands, removed from Hagatña around 1878.  The moving private and official ceremonial return was attended by sanlågu CHamorus mostly from the East Coast who gathered respectfully to send them home with a proper farewell.
Copyright photo by Manny Crisostomo

Now, in the world of museum repatriations, the process often takes many years. Fran first heard about the possibility of CHamoru remains at the New York City museum, when she was involved in an earlier repatriation to the Northern Marianas by UC Riverside. 

She leveraged her museum connections, and in nine months she found the right person at the American Museum of Natural History who could comb through the database for any mentions of “Chamorro” remains from the Northern Marianas Islands. Her connection didn’t find any from the Northern Marianas, but “she said we found other references — to Guahan, Ladrones, Chamorro.” 

Electrified by the discovery, Fran hatched a “rescue plan.”  

Because she didn’t have standing under Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act rules, Fran worked with Guam Museum curator Michael Lujan Bevacqua, Commission on Decolonization Executive Director Melvin Won Pat-Borja and Patrick Lujan to serve as an intermediary between GovGuam and the museum.  

As a museum director and former assistant staff officer for Information and Public Affairs under the late Gov. Ricardo “Ricky” Bordallo, “I know how to navigate the protocols of big institutions and Government of Guam — they are formulas.” 

In September 2025, she flew to New York City to confirm what the collection catalog said. “I’m a person of evidence, facts — they had nothing, no photos, just a catalog number: 281, 282, 283.”  

Working with the museum staff — whom she described as professional, kind and generous — they discovered the three skulls and a jawbone that did not belong to No. 3, bringing the total count of remains to four. 

With the discovery of CHamoru remains confirmed and a repatriation request submitted, the last hurdle was approval from the museum’s board of trustees, whose next meeting wasn’t until  February of this year.    

“But, from trustees’ approval to the handover ceremony, it was 31 days,” a feat Fran calls “truly miraculous.” 

Throughout the yearslong journey, Fran said she could hear “all those ancestors all the way on the East Coast calling me” like the kulu. 

“It’s not like I heard their voices saying,’Frannie come and help me,’” she said. Rather, she listened for their voices within the dry data of museum archives.

"I know how to read the notes. It’s like coding," she said. "I wasn't looking at those words as scientific data; I was looking at them as voices. Somewhere in these words, I could hear them."

The remains of four CHamoru “Matua” with inscriptions on the back of the skull.
Copyright photo by Manny Crisostomo

Calling it her “obligation as a CHamoru to do this,” the self-described “get-it-done girl” put in her own time, money and connections to bring home these ancestors, who are now no longer catalog numbers in a New York museum.  

“It’s been a privilege to be part of this journey.”