...John Oliver hit it out of the park.
BUT - you know the part where some museum snobs say they'd return the material if the originating country would take care of what they already have? There's actually a kernel of truth to that. And I will vigorously defend the fact that most of a museum's specimens are not on exhibit.
I work on modern and fossil bones, and so in some ways, my situation is a bit different. What I'm working on isn't a direct reflection of subjugated cultures. But it's basically the same insofar as specimens were often shipped back to colonial powers with little consideration of what the people living where they were found might think.
In general, I'm a big fan of repatriating this material whenever feasible. But you know what? While I've been to museums in developing countries with state of the art collections facilities and highly-trained collections management and curatorial professionals, I've also been to museums in developing countries where the specimens are deteriorating in squalid conditions, where museum bureaucrats are more than willing to sell off their own specimens for personal profit, and where data management is so poor that, after a few years, most of the information needed to say something about a specimen is lost. And by that, I mean most of the information was in the memory of a curator who retired, there was never a computerized catalogue, and the specimen labels have faded and been half-eaten by silverfish.
Repatriating the material should be the default solution, but there are nevertheless hard questions to ask. Will they be kept in an adequate collections facility, whether they're displayed or not? Are they being returned to a country where they'll disappear, either kept by some official or sold? These are serious questions. Is repatriation the right solution when the repatriated items will be lost in short order?
(Added on edit - there are circumstances where we should expect repatriated items to be lost - for example, if they were taken from a grave, and the originating community plans to reinter them.)
Not saying there are easy answers to that, but the question does have to be asked.
There's also the matter of shipping the specimens, which might not be possible without risking serious damage. I've been personally involved in such issues. I once encountered fossils in a museum in one country, and two weeks later found notes in a museum in another country referring to them. They'd evidently been loaned to someone in the first museum who kept mediocre notes and then died. No one at the first museum knew where they were from. The people in the second country obviously (and rightfully) want them back - but they're extremely delicate. I expressed my deep concern that they'd be destroyed during shipment. So the museum in the second country agreed to leave them in the first museum on long-term loan, but with catalogue numbers from the second museum.
As for the fact that so many of these things are being kept out of the public's eye:
You know that big room at the Field Museum where all of those Native American artifacts were shown? The show didn't mention that the Field Museum has an active program working with Native American communities to repatriate some of this material - but more importantly, that collections facility is climate-controlled, the location of each specimen is known precisely, and those numbers written in Sharpie refer to precise catalogue information that can be easily retrieved. And the material is being actively studied. This isn't like the big warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark where antique treasures are stuffed away, never to be seen again - it's more like a library, where researchers can look through the material to learn things.
The same is true of the great majority of fossils in most museums, which are held in the collections and not on exhibit. In fact - and many people find this surprising - there are museums that have no exhibits at all. Quite literally everything they maintain (whether they own it or not) is in cabinets. And "cabinet" used to be synonymous with "museum."
Like I said, these should be compared not with dank basements, but with libraries. Most of the specimens would not be of interest to most visitors - when I've shown friends and family what I'm working on, they shrug at anything that isn't a complete skull.
And it's not just the Western museums that do that. I've been to the National Museum of Ethiopia several times, and I've actually had the privilege of seeing Lucy. There's a high-quality cast on exhibit there, but the real specimen is in a secure facility. It's considered a national treasure and treated as such.
Anyway - a few thoughts. I did agree with most of this episode, but sometimes, real situations are more nuanced than the show implied.
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