Yagan

Who was Yagan?

Yagan was an Australian Aboriginal warrior from the Noongar tribe who played a key part in early indigenous Australian resistance to British settlement and rule in the area of Perth, Western Australia. After he led a series of burglaries and robberies across the countryside, in which white settlers were killed, the government offered a bounty for his capture, dead or alive. A young settler shot and killed him. Yagan's execution figured in Aboriginal folklore as a symbol of the unjust and sometimes brutal treatment of the indigenous peoples of Australia by colonial settlers. Yagan is considered a hero by the Noongar people.

Settlers removed Yagan's head to claim the bounty. Later an official took it to London, where it was exhibited as an "anthropological curiosity". A museum held the head in storage for more than a century before burying it with other remains in an unmarked grave in Liverpool in 1964. Over the years, the Noongar asked for repatriation of the head, both for religious reasons and because of Yagan's traditional stature in the culture. In 1993 the burial site was identified. Four years later officials exhumed the head and repatriated it to Australia. Since 1997, the indigenous people of the Perth area debated how to treat Yagan's head in a respectful way. They finally buried it in July 2010, in a traditional Noongar ceremony in the Swan Valley in Western Australia, 177 years after Yagan's death.