Our Forefathers Are Coming Back: The Year Heritage Started Returning Home

In a meadow called Sunaseri, high in the Pir Panjal mountains of Jammu and Kashmir, the air was thick with the beat of hand drums and the scent of simmering ethnic cuisine. For two days this September, the Pahari community gathered to sing the songs their grandparents sang — and to show travelers that heritage isn't a museum artifact. It's a living, breathing invitation.

Three thousand miles to the north-east, in the state of Arunachal Pradesh, the Leyi Banggo community held its first-ever Solung Giidi Celebration. Deputy Chief Minister Chowna Mein had a simple message for the crowd: "We should never lose our spirit and our roots." His call? Document indigenous languages and oral traditions using modern technology — even creating new teaching posts for local dialects — before they fade.

This is a year when indigenous culture isn't just surviving. It's returning.

The ancestors are coming home

Nowhere is that more powerful than in Oxford, England. After six years of negotiations, the Pitt Rivers Museum announced it will return 39 pieces of human remains — parts of skulls, a finger, a piece of skin with hair — to the Naga people of north-eastern India. The remains were collected by British colonial administrators and displayed in the museum for nearly a century.

"We are at peace," said A Peihwang Wangsa, an Indigenous Konyak man who helped negotiate the return. "Our forefathers are coming back."

For the Naga community, this isn't bones-and-boxes bureaucracy. As they put it themselves, the repatriation is "about memory returning to where it belongs." Thejao Vihienuo, who travelled to Oxford in 2025 and saw his ancestors' remains on display, called it a homecoming of "mourning and celebration." Community leader NT Thamlong Phom put it more simply: "Our ancestors' spirit will have a final resting place."

Heritage as a game you play

Meanwhile, in Guyana, September 24 marks the start of the National Heritage Games at the Everest Cricket Ground — Indigenous athletes competing in celebration of culture. And in New York's Howes Cave, the 43rd Annual Iroquois Arts Festival showcased Haudenosaunee social dances, storytelling and art, insisting that a 21st-century culture is a living one.

Even sport itself is being remade in this spirit. England scrum-half Natasha Hunt — a veteran of two Olympic Games — is fighting her way back from knee surgery, driven by a single dream: the inaugural British and Irish Lions women's tour to New Zealand, with its first Test exactly a year away. "Every player that is close to playing for their country in those four nations is thinking about it," she laughs. "And if they say they're not, they're lying!"

Then there's Daniel Dias, Brazil's most decorated Paralympian, who won 27 medals across four Games — including six golds at London 2012 alone. He retired in 2020, but his story keeps pulling people into pools. Para sport, he says, transformed his life; now his legacy does the same for others.

The thread that ties it all

What connects a Naga homecoming in Oxford, a folk festival in Kashmir, a heritage games in Guyana, and a Lions tour counting down to kick-off? It's the same conviction, spoken in every dialect: that identity is not a thing you inherit passively — it's something you actively return to, protect, and pass forward.

From a deputy chief minister urging communities to record their oral literature, to a scrum-half chasing a once-unimaginable Test match, to a Brazilian swimmer whose 14 gold medals still inspire a new generation — the message is unanimous.

The past isn't finished with us. And neither are we with it.