'Ape Woman' Buried After 150 Years Away from Mexican Homeland (VIDEO)

Nearly 150-years after leaving her homeland, an indigenous Mexican woman who was paraded around the world because of her abnormal features and whose dead body was kept in a museum exhibit has finally returned home for a proper burial.

In 1854, 20-years-old Julia Pastrana left her native coastal state of Sinaloa to embark on a journey with a traveling circus. Her protruding jaw, hairy face and body were characteristics that showman Theodore Lent knew could draw an audience. Known as the "Ape Woman", Pastrana toured the United States, Europe, and Russia. She became popular as she sung and danced for pay.

After her death in Moscow from a fever that she developed from complications at childbirth, Pastrana's body was taken to the University of Oslo, Norway. During an era of colonization, Pastrana was one among thousands of exotic tribal people kept in museums as a study piece for European observers.

After requests from the Mexican government, her remains were removed and shipped to Sinaloa where on Tuesday after a Catholic funeral mass she was buried in a local cemetery, the Associate Press reports.

"Julia Pastrana has come home," said Saul Rubio Ayala, mayor of her hometown of Sinaloa de Leyva. "Julia has been reborn among us. Let us never see another woman be turned into an object of commerce."

Since the 1980s, museum's throughout the United States, Europe, and Australia have been returning the thousands of bodies that were on display to their native homeland. The change came about as anthropologists, archeologists and curators began to see the eurocentrism in their field of study, expert and author Tiffany Jenkins said.

"You know I have mixed feelings," Mexican Ambassador Martha Barcena Coqui, who is based in Copenhagen and saw the body before it was shipped to Mexico, said . "In one way, I think she had a very interesting life and maybe she enjoyed visiting and traveling and seeing all the places, but at the same time I think it must have been very sad to travel to these places not as a normal human being but as a matter of exhibition, as something weird to be talked about."

Footage of Pastrana's burial can be seen below.