On a gallery floor in Bloomsbury, four tonnes of basalt stand sentinel. Hoa Hakananai’a – the lost or stolen friend, as its Rapa Nui name translates – has occupied Room 24 of the British Museum for more than 150 years. Its back bears petroglyphs of the tangata manu, the birdman cult that once unified the clans of one of the most remote inhabited islands on Earth. For the museum, it is a centrepiece of its Living and Dying display. For the Rapa Nui people, it is a grandfather whose spirit was taken from his home.
Since 2018, when the Council of Elders of Rapa Nui formally wrote to the British Museum requesting the statue’s return, the question of where Hoa Hakananai’a belongs has escalated from a quiet diplomatic exchange into one of the most visible repatriation battles in the world. In early 2024, a Chilean social media influencer named Mike Milfort turned it into a viral cause – and forced the British Museum into an uncomfortable public reckoning it has yet to resolve.
The Campaign That Broke the Silence
Milfort, a Santiago-based creator with millions of followers across TikTok and Instagram, began posting videos about the statue in January 2024. His call was direct: flood the British Museum’s social media accounts with demands to “return the moai.” His followers obliged. Within days, the museum’s Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube comment sections were overwhelmed with the phrase Devuelvan el moai – give the moai back. The museum’s response was to deactivate comments on several posts, including one made in collaboration with a youth charity – a move that drew accusations of censorship.
“The moai are deeply significant for the people of Rapa Nui, and their calls for repatriation have been ongoing for decades,” said Freya Samuel, a museum decolonisation and digital engagement consultant, speaking to The Art Newspaper at the time. “There really is no question as to where these statues belong, but as expected, the British Museum refuses to engage in meaningful discussions around repatriation.”
The campaign’s reach extended far beyond social media. Chile’s President Gabriel Boric publicly backed the movement during a radio interview, telling listeners: “Let the English give us back the moai.” Yet the intervention was not universally welcomed on the island itself. Pedro Edmunds Paoa, the mayor of Rapa Nui, accused Boric of politicising “something that is so holistically, spiritually and culturally important to us,” and expressed concern that the campaign had reduced a sacred ancestor to an internet meme. The tension between viral activism and indigenous protocol exposed a fault line that runs through every modern repatriation dispute: who gets to lead the conversation, and on whose terms?
A Statue with a Contested History
The story of how Hoa Hakananai’a left Rapa Nui has been rewritten – and re-rewritten – across nearly two centuries. The conventional account is straightforward: in 1868, Commodore Richard Ashmore Powell’s HMS Topaze sailed to Rapa Nui during a Pacific surveying expedition. Powell’s crew removed the statue from a stone house near the ceremonial site of Orongo, presented it to Queen Victoria, and the Queen donated it to the British Museum in 1869.
For years, the narrative held that the statue had been taken without consent. But in February 2026, archaeologist Mike Pitts published a revised account in British Archaeology, based on a previously overlooked eyewitness report and newly identified photographs of the excavation team. According to the anonymous witness – a member of the Topaze crew – the British were “met by about four hundred men and boys standing in a perfect line” upon arrival. The islanders, the account claims, showed the crew a concealed entrance to the stone house, traded tobacco with the sailors, and assisted in the excavation.
“It had been said that Hoa Hakananai’a was stolen,” Pitts wrote. But the new evidence suggests a more complex picture – one in which the islanders facilitated the removal, possibly as a gift, though under the deeply unequal power dynamics of colonial contact. Pitts also identified geological samples drilled from the statue’s back in 1917, stored unseen at the British Geological Survey for over a century. Analysis could reveal the precise volcanic outcrop from which the basalt was quarried – knowledge that would be “productive and informative” for both the museum and the islanders.
The revised history does not settle the question of ownership. Even Pitts, who believes the statue should remain in London as “a Rapanui ambassador in Europe,” acknowledges that the current arrangement – where the museum holds the object while refusing to acknowledge indigenous sovereignty over it – is unsustainable.
The Director’s Dilemma
In March 2024, Nicholas Cullinan became the British Museum’s twentieth director, inheriting an institution battered by the 2023 thefts and besieged by repatriation claims from Greece, Nigeria, Egypt, China, and Rapa Nui. His response has been to articulate a vision of the museum as a “collaborative” institution that shares its collection through long-term loans rather than permanent transfers.
“I’m keenly aware that whatever I do future generations will debate, so I feel more comfortable with loaning items,” Cullinan told The Times in May 2025. “This collection has been formed over three centuries. It is the world’s greatest collection. I don’t see my job as undoing that.”
Under Cullinan, the museum launched a lending programme sending objects to museums in former British colonies on loans of up to three years. The first major shipment – eighty Greek and Egyptian antiquities – arrived at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya in Mumbai in late 2025. Cullinan has visited China, Nigeria, and Ghana to negotiate similar partnerships, framing the initiative as “cultural diplomacy” rather than restitution.
But the model has limits. Greece has rejected any arrangement that would require it to acknowledge the British Museum’s ownership of the Parthenon Sculptures. Nigeria’s new Museum of West African Art has been offered loans but has made clear it wants the Benin Bronzes back, not on deposit. And for the Rapa Nui, the idea of a “lending library” misses the point entirely. The islanders are not asking for their ancestor to visit. They are asking for him to come home.
“We are not ruling out that the Hoa Hakananai’a could stay in London and be our great ambassador,” Edmunds Paoa told The Guardian in 2024. “But we need to firmly establish that its rightful owner is the culture of Rapa Nui.”
The Legal Wall
The British Museum’s position rests on a single piece of legislation: the British Museum Act 1963, which prohibits the trustees from disposing of objects in the collection. The Act has no public interest exception, no moral override, no mechanism for restitution on ethical grounds. To change it would require an act of Parliament – a process that Cullinan has described as a distraction from the museum’s core mission.
Yet the legal landscape is shifting. In November 2025, new provisions under the Charities Act 2022 came into force, allowing non-national charities to make small ex gratia disposals on moral grounds without Charity Commission approval. But sixteen institutions – including the British Museum, the Tate, and the National Gallery – were specifically excluded from its reach.
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport confirmed in February 2026 that it would review this exclusion, a decision welcomed by campaigners. “Hopefully, many museums will utilise this principle to engage in repatriation,” said Amy Shakespeare, an academic at the University of Exeter and founder of Routes to Return. “However, it is incredibly disappointing that the government has missed the opportunity to demonstrate meaningful support for repatriation by excluding these 16 museums from the new provisions.”
Arts Council England updated its practical guide to restitution and repatriation in March 2026 to align with the Charities Act changes. But for the British Museum, the gap between what is legally possible and what is morally required remains vast. As long as the 1963 Act stands, the institution can – and will – point to Parliament as the only body with the power to unlock the door.
More Than a Statue
The Hoa Hakananai’a dispute is, in one sense, a story about a single object: a carved basalt figure with petroglyphs on its back, standing in a glass case in central London. But it is also a story about what museums are for, who owns cultural memory, and whether the nineteenth-century universal museum can survive the ethical demands of the twenty-first.
The British Museum houses approximately eight million objects, the majority acquired during the height of British imperial power, under conditions ranging from outright plunder to transactions with colonised peoples who had no meaningful choice. Hoa Hakananai’a is not an isolated case. It is the most visible symptom of a systemic condition.
What makes the Rapa Nui campaign distinctive is its refusal to accept the binary that has dominated repatriation discourse for decades – the framing of the issue as a zero-sum contest between universal museums and originating communities. The islanders have proposed alternatives: a replica carved by Rapa Nui sculptor Benedicto Tuki could stand in the British Museum’s gallery while the original returns home; the museum could retain long-term stewardship while formally acknowledging Rapa Nui ownership; the geological samples Pitts identified could become the basis for a joint research programme. These proposals are not mutually exclusive. They represent a vision of restitution that is creative, generous, and grounded in the specific relationship between an island and an ocean.
The social media campaign may have been messy, politically opportunistic, and reductive. But it succeeded in doing something that decades of formal diplomacy had not: it made the world pay attention. And in doing so, it placed the British Museum’s new director in a position he cannot easily escape. Cullinan may prefer loans to legislation, collaboration to confrontation. But the Rapa Nui have made their position clear. They are not asking for a loan. They are asking for justice.
