The day Santi Hitorangi would touch the human remains of his ancestors was meant to mark the beginning of the end of their 140-year spell in forced exile.
The UN representative for the Polynesian territory known to many Europeans as Easter Island has spent the last four years in Leipzig, eastern Germany, preparing the repatriation of 28 members of the Huki and Hitorangi clans of the Rapa Nui nation whose Ivi tupuna (skeletal remains) were taken from their original places of rest by a German gunboat expedition in 1882 and ended up in the collections of the states of Saxony and Berlin.
