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Yagan

Yagan (; c. 1795 – 11 July 1833) was an Indigenous Australian warrior from the Noongar people. He played a key part in early resistance to British settlement and rule in the area surrounding what is now Perth, Western Australia. Yagan was pursued by the local authorities after he killed a servant of Archibald Butler in an act of retaliation after Smedley, another servant of Butler, shot at a group of Noongar people taking potatoes and fowls, killing one of them. The government offered a bounty for Yagan's capture, dead or alive, and a young settler, William Keats, subsequently shot and killed him. Yagan's execution figures in Aboriginal folklore as a symbol of the unjust and sometimes brutal treatment of the indigenous peoples of Australia by colonial settlers. He is considered a hero by the Noongar.

After his shooting, settlers removed Yagan's head to claim the bounty. Later, an official sent it to London, where it was exhibited as an " anthropological curiosity" and eventually given to a museum in Liverpool. It 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. The burial site was identified in 1993; officials exhumed the head four years later and repatriated it to Australia. After years of debate within the Noongar community on the appropriate final resting place, Yagan's head was buried in a traditional ceremony in the Swan Valley in July 2010, 177 years after his death.