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The British Museum is facing renewed calls to return a huge moai statue to Easter Island, sparked by a social media campaign by Chilean activists.
Easter Island, known as Rapa Nui in the local language and Isla de Pascua in Spanish, is a Chilean dependency in the Pacific Ocean that is famous for the “moai” statues that dot its landscape.
Islanders carved the enormous paleolithic structures in the shape of human heads to commemorate their ancestors, believing that they represent incarnations of dead relatives.
Social media influencer Mike Milfort, who has 7.5 million followers on TikTok, has made a number of posts about the moai at the British Museum, an 8-foot-tall basalt figure known as Hoa Hakananai’a (“lost or stolen friend”), which was taken without permission in 1868.