There are 10 human skulls stored at a German university that McMichael Mutok Jr wants to bring home.
The skulls were taken more than 100 years ago from villages in his country Palau, an archipelago in the north-west Pacific where Mr Mutok Jr works as a registrar.
They are kept in cardboard boxes in the University of Göttingen's anthropological department, each skull stamped with a number that corresponds to an index card.
"There were 10 [skulls] in the collections. But there were 12 index cards that correspond to Palau," he said.
"That means there are two missing."
Mr Mutok Jr doesn't know where the two missing skulls might be, and fears many more of his country's ancestral remains are hidden in museums and universities in Germany.
Skulls, human remains kept in German university
Earlier this year, Mr Mutok Jr became a fellow of the University of Göttingen's Sensitive Provenances project, which aims to research and return the more than 1,000 skulls and other human remains kept in the university's collections.
Many of the skulls were collected from Germany's former colonies, or other countries visited by German explorers in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Most are from Africa and the Pacific region – including Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and Palau.
Despite being in charge of preserving Palau's history and cultural artefacts, Mr Mutok Jr and his colleagues had no idea their country's ancestral remains had been shipped overseas.
That's because many of the skull collectors worked in secret, hiding their actions from local Pacific Islanders, as Mr Mutok Jr discovered when reading the translated journals of Paul Hambruch.
Hambruch was a German ethnologist who travelled through the Pacific as part of the South Seas Expedition in the early 20th century.
"Paul Hambruch actually went to one of these villages [in Palau], and he actually said to the villagers that he needed a couple of skulls," Mr Mutok Jr said.
"The villagers actually refused, so he went there by himself and took a couple of them, without their knowledge."
The local people may have noticed their burial sites were disturbed the next day, Mr Mutok Jr speculates, but would have never expected anyone to have removed the bodies.
"It's actually pretty sad that we didn't know about it until now," he said.
"We do respect our ancestors … we do not want to disturb their gravesites."
'Race science' spawns skull collections
There were further shocking discoveries to be found, linking the skull collectors with a racist and now-condemned scientific discipline.
"What I learned is that skulls were collected because they were trying to compare the brain capacity between the Germans and the Islanders to see how intelligent they were," Mr Mutok Jr said.
"I would say, the Germans way back 100 years ago, they're kind of racist trying to compare us."
Scientists from Germany were collecting the skulls from around the world to categorise human anatomy as a part of "race science" to analyse differences between nationalities.
Social anthropologist Jonatan Kurzwelly, a postdoctoral fellow researching the Sensitive Provenances project at the University of Göttingen, said the skull collectors were often unwilling participants of this now-condemned discipline.
"It has been networks of missionaries, of early explorers, and so on, who have kind of been requested to deliver human remains, often initially at great reluctance," he said.
"[They] have ultimately sent these human remains to the early scientists of the Enlightenment, who then established comparative anatomy and often quite explicitly wanted to do what today is described as 'race science'."
'Good motivations are just not enough'
Paradoxically, Dr Kurzwelly has found not all of these scientists had "negative motivations", though the science they developed eventually contributed to racist ideologies.
He points to Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a German scientist with "anti-racist motivations" who studied skulls to try and support his belief that humanity shared a common ancestor.
"We often think of the early race scientists as being motivated by racist thinking," he said.
"Perhaps many of them were, but this is one example of someone who has been motivated by abolitionist thinking,"
But despite Blumenbach's intentions, his research formed some of the early roots of phrenology – a pseudoscience that continues to spread in racist and Neo-Nazi circles today.
"It's one of the examples where perhaps good motivations are just not enough," Dr Kurzwelly said.
He has similar concerns around how current attempts to restitute skulls may rely on outdated, racist and "illogical" methods.
"Some of the methods are measuring the skull and saying, 'Well, this measurement looks like an Ethiopian, or a Malay', and we are kind of committing the same logical error," Dr Kurzwelly said.
"There is this kind of subtle danger in trying to do good, but through trying to address historical injustices, legitimising thinking that has kind of neo-racial undertones."
'Emotional journey' to return remains
The project to return the human remains stored in Göttingen is part of a renewed focus by Germany's institutions to recognise and confront its colonial past.
"Germany has been very strong and kind of reworking through the history of the Second World War and the Holocaust," Dr Kurzwelly said.
"But Germany only recently woke up to its colonial history."
Part of the project includes inviting researchers from Africa and the Pacific to study the anthropological collections and help find out how to return the skulls to the families.
Fijian archaeologist Dr Tarisi Vunidilo is one such postdoctoral fellow at the University of Göttingen.
"It's quite an emotional journey, because a lot of us look at these human remains just like family," Dr Vunidilo said.
"When you see them traded like a piece of wood or any other item it's quite moving."
She said it was a difficult process to find the families and return their ancestral remains, as many are stored without comprehensive identification.
"In some countries, they do kind of a combined burial or a memorial where all of these human remains that were unidentified [can be remembered]," she said.
One such ceremony took place in Hawaii earlier this year, when 13 skeletal remains called iwi kūpuna were returned to their descendants.
Professor Regina F. Bendix from the University of Göttingen spoke at the event.
"We need to apologise on behalf of our forbearers for holding your ancestors for so long, unburied in cartons and closets," she said.
Calls for DNA testing to help with return
Despite the tragedy surrounding the skulls and their theft from Pacific communities, Dr Vunidilo is glad to be working with Germany's institutions to return the remains.
"The reason why I'm here is that I was invited. That's totally different from 10 or 20 years ago," she said.
"It's shifting from museums being gatekeepers or stopping Indigenous people from accessing these collections, to now inviting people from Indigenous communities to actually come along and research about their own people.
"I think that's a wonderful thing that Germany is doing."
But for many Pacific communities, the journey to bring home their ancestors' skeletons has only just started.
Back in Palau, McMichael Mutok Jr is hoping that DNA sampling will help locate the families of the 10 skulls held in Germany.
He said it would be at least a year before they would be returned home.
"I feel like there's still more out there. There's still more work to do."
