Museum of Stolen Artifacts

The Museum of Stolen Artefacts, or MoSA, is a counter-colonial museum led by communities whose cultural objects were stolen during colonialism. It exists to name those artefacts, tell their stories on their own terms, and support their restitution.

Beginning with the case of Rapa Nui, it creates tools and strategies for communities to document stolen artefacts on their own terms, build claims for restitution, and challenge the authority Western museums still hold over their cultural belongings.

MoSA treats artefacts not as neutral heritage or display pieces, but as living entities tied to people, territory, memory, and survival.

MoSA combines community-led research, databases shaped by Indigenous worldviews, legal and narrative strategies, and public interventions inside and beyond museum spaces.

That includes building databases shaped by Indigenous worldviews rather than Western museum logic; creating legal, narrative, and organisational tools for communities seeking the return of stolen artefacts; and using media, public interventions, and counter-storytelling to challenge the authority museums still hold over knowledge, ownership, and truth.

MoSA begins with Rapa Nui, but it is designed to grow into a wider network connecting colonised cultures whose objects and ancestors are held by the same institutions. The point is not only to document loss, but to build collective power across struggles that have long been treated in isolation.

MoSA exists because stolen artefacts are still being held by the institutions that took them, or benefited from their theft. Museums continue to treat them as assets to manage, study, insure, display, and profit from, while the communities they were taken from are expected to settle for recognition, dialogue, or carefully staged gestures.

We reject that logic. Restitution is not a symbolic exchange or a reputational exercise for Western museums. It is part of material reparation: the return of what was taken, the transfer of decision-making power, and the restoration of communities’ authority over their cultural belongings.

MoSA works to support that process in concrete ways: by building tools for restitution claims, strengthening community-led decision-making, challenging the legal and institutional systems that normalise possession, and connecting struggles across different colonised peoples facing the same museums.

The question is not whether Western institutions are ready to let go. The question is why they still have the power to decide. Our answer is clear: they should not. That power belongs to the communities the artefacts were taken from.