#repatriation

This helmet was made using the skin of a porcupine-fish that was killed and then carefully dried. The front edge is lined with vegetable fiber and human hair, and it's equipped with coconut-fiber ties that were used to fasten the helmet onto the wearer's head.

Above: another porcupine-fish helmet from Kiribati

Helmets with this design are also known as te barantauti, and they were created as part of a traditional costume that was worn by the warriors of Kiribati (an island nation located in the South Pacific). Most of the surviving examples date back to the mid-1800s.

Above: a porcupine-fish helmet displayed with a high-backed cuirass, wrist-guard, and sword, c.1800s CE

Te barantauti were typically worn with body armor that was crafted from coconut-fiber and stingray skin, along with braided wrist-guards covered in shark's teeth, high-backed cuirasses, and wooden swords, spears, and daggers studded with stingray spines and shark's teeth.

Above: wrist-guards and cuirasses from Kiribati, c.1800-1880 CE

In some cases, the warrior's helmet was crafted from coconut-fiber instead. The same material was also used to construct sleeves, belts, and "overalls" that effectively covered the rest of the body.

Above: a coconut-fiber helmet with a full set of armor

The porcupine-fish helmets provided very little protection -- they were primarily created and used as a way to intimidate enemies during ritual combat.

Above: an armored warrior from Kiribati, mid-1800s

As this article explains:

The men of Kiribati were famed for their fierceness, and when it came time for battle, they dressed the part, in head-to-toe armor made from coconut fiber and stingray skin. Their weapons were wooden swords lined with sharks’ teeth.

The crown jewel of Kiribati armor, though, was a spiky helmet made from the porcupinefish. A member of the blowfish family, a porcupinefish looks like an adorable big-eyed cartoon character—until it’s threatened. Then, it sucks water into a cavity between its body and skin and inflates to several times its normal size, stiffening the spines that usually lie flat.

Porcupinefish helmets, known as te barantauti, were made by capturing one of these agitated, puffed-up porcupinefish, killing it, peeling the skin away from the body, and drying it. The spiny skin that remained was reinforced with coconut-fiber padding and fashioned into a brittle helmet.

Though the helmets offered little in the way of actual protection, they instantly made their wearers appear bigger, taller, and more formidable.

For Kiribati warriors, this intimidation was more important than protection from death. That’s because in traditional Kiribati culture, a person who took someone’s life—even in a fair fight—paid with their most prized resource: their land. So instead of going for the kill, warriors sought to wound and humiliate their enemy. Fish-skin and coconut-fiber offered just the right amount of protection.

Above: a shark-tooth sword from Kiribati, c.1800s CE

Unfortunately, most of the surviving helmets, weapons, and pieces of armor are now housed in Western museums:

Over the years, dozens of these helmets made their way into museums across the globe, while few remain in Kiribati. The Smithsonian actually has three, the British Museum five, and Sweden’s Världskulturmuseerna “at least eight,” according to their digitization curator Magnus Johansson. One te barantauti even wound up at the Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium, in the tiny town of St. Johnsbury, Vermont.

Over the last four decades, since Kiribati gained its independence from the United Kingdom in 1979, the armor has taken on a new meaning—as a potent symbol of local culture. It features on tourist trinkets, but also stamps and school mascots. “The armor is not just a garment to me,” says Rareti Ataniberu, an I-Kiribati craftswoman. “It is a piece of art, a craft.”

Sources & More Info:

Hakai Magazine: Kiribati’s Porcupine-Fish Helmets were More about Drama than Defense

Atlas Obscura: The Mystery of the Puffer-Fish Helmets of Kiribati

Pacific Presences: Fighting Fibres: Kiribati Armour and Museum Collections

Time Magazine: Why Indigenous Artifacts Should be Returned to Indigenous Communities

The Museum of New Zealand: Te tauti from Kiribati

Denver Art Museum: Shark-Tooth Sword

Article: ‘Do not let this crime happen’: Chinook Tribe fights for return of ‘neglected’ remains

You may have noticed the following inscription on one of the front pages of The Everyday Naturalist:

This book was written on unceded Chinook land on the Long Beach Peninsula in southwest Washington. The Chinook Indian Nation has been fighting for more than half a century for federal recognition. While they were briefly recognized in 2001, eighteen months later their recognition was rescinded. To learn how you can help the Chinook fight to regain recognition and thereby gain access to much-needed resources, please visit ChinookJustice.org.

The article I linked at the top is exactly why that message is there. Those stolen remains are one of many reasons why the Chinook are seeking recognition again. Repatriation of ancestral remains and cultural artifacts is one way we've been able to try to undo at least a bit of the damage after centuries of colonial occupation and genocide of indigenous people, but only tribes and communities deemed legitimate by the federal government are able to request repatriation; unrecognized peoples are left out in the cold.

Imagine if someone went to a cemetery where your ancestors had been buried for many centuries, dug up the remains, and decided to put them in a museum or sell them for private collections. Or consider that a not-insignificant number of Native American corpses after battles with U.S. troops or settlers were then stolen for anthropological specimens and artifacts, or bones for medical study. (David Hurst Thomas' excellent book Skull Wars details that long, sordid practice.) Now, think about how on top of being forced off their land, murdered and starved, kidnapped as children, and seeing their ways of life being made illegal, indigenous people had to watch the remains of their families for generations stolen away without any recompense.

That's why we have repatriation. It's the least thing we can do in the face of this awful history. Yet entire communities are barred from seeking the return of their ancestors because they aren't federally recognized, often for political reasons.

HUGE news in Sweden in the world of decolonialising museums!!

Sweden’s oldest museum and one of its largest have been granted 400 000kr (approx. €37k) to during 2026 begin the process of repatriating their Saami artefacts to Sàpmi

The audacity

To display sacred objects ritual masks, ancestral symbols, vessels of meaning as mere “art.” To take what was once living, breathing culture and lock it behind glass, stripped of its voice, its people, its purpose.

These masks were never meant to be static. They danced, they healed, they connected worlds. And yet, here they are coldly lit, catalogued, consumed. The legacy of the Dakar-Djibouti mission and so many others like it, theft disguised as discovery, violence wrapped in curiosity.

It’s infuriating to see pieces of our spiritual lives treated as trophies of empire, while their true homes still ache with absence. These objects don’t belong in museum basements, they belong in ceremonies, in communities, in continuity.