Above: Potawatomi representatives at the Dickson Mounds Museum, October 1995. Photo courtesy of Dickson Mounds Museum, branch of the Illinois State Museum

Scholars who have addressed the history of the repatriation movement focus on why Americans treated Native remains and objects the way they did. American collecting of these objects, they argue, should be understood as a form of “nation building,” in which Americans came to view the dead bodies of Indians as trophies.

In Europe, displaying non-Western people as “living exotics” or “wildmen” and collecting objects they made began in the 15th century and continued as European states occupied other continents. In colonial America, Indian graves and sacred objects were desecrated soon after Europeans arrived. In the Midwest, Black Hawk’s remains were disinterred shortly after his death in 1838 and his bones were put on public display. The remains of other Indian leaders were so treated. In the 1860s, the federal government legitimized the collection of American Indian remains when the Surgeon General advocated procuring Indian heads and other body parts for study at the Army Medical Museum in Washington. This encouraged the practice of decapitating Indians and shipping their brains to Washington.

Scientists used collections of bones at first in a misguided effort to study human evolution. Associated with the idea of racial hierarchy was the belief that each “race” had a uniquely shaped skull. By the 20th century, burials on public land were considered public property, and Indian remains were taken from massacre sites, battlegrounds, prisons, schools, and cemeteries (including mounds). Eventually, over 18,000 Native American remains were stored at the Smithsonian Institution alone.

In the late 19th century, international fairs like the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago exhibited living and dead Indians, both for the crowd’s entertainment and to highlight the supposed primitivism of indigenous peoples. Carnivals had these kinds of dehumanizing exhibits, and private collectors bought “Indian relics” or “curiosities”—skulls, bones, pots—to display in their homes. In fact, collecting Indian skulls was a popular “hobby.” Scholars writing about this period describe such exhibits as “displays of power.” Native people were transformed into alien outsiders, while majority Americans saw themselves as the “true” Americans destined to possess Indian land and property.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the federal government’s assimilation program discouraged the practice of Native religion and lifeways, and the prevailing opinion was that Indians were disappearing and their cultures dying. Museums purchased or obtained as donations thousands of Indian-manufactured objects from Indian communities. Sometimes Indian exhibits were displayed alongside dinosaurs or other extinct animals. Indian collections sometimes were studied, but often the goal was to safeguard them. Displays of “traditional” objects conveyed the message that Indian people lived in the past, not the present.

Studies of NAGPRA’s implementation often conclude that the repatriation process is undermined by the federal government’s continued domination in Indian relations. For example, the law specified that federally-recognized tribes were entitled to repatriate items, yet the more appropriate group might be clans or religious societies. Moreover, non-recognized tribes could not make repatriation claims. And, the government did not provide adequate funding to enable tribes to send representatives to museums or build a case for repatriation.

Read one archaeologist’s critique of new NAGPRA regulations. Do you agree or disagree with him?

New York Times
December 12, 2010
“Bones of Contention”
By Robert L. Kelly
Laramie, Wyo.

Last winter, the Department of the Interior issued regulations for the disposition of ancient American Indian remains and funerary objects that cannot be affiliated with modern tribes. Unfortunately, these new rules will destroy a crucial source of knowledge about North American history and halt a dialogue between scientists and Indian tribes that has been harmonious and enlightening.

The new regulations help carry out the 20-year-old Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, a law that was devised by tribes, scientists and museum officials. It was a compromise between the tribes’ sensitivity to having the remains of their ancestors excavated and analyzed and the archaeologists’ desire to learn what bones can reveal about ancient peoples’ diet, health, migration patterns, marriage practices and so on.

Scientists acknowledged that it is wrong to study the dead in ways that insult the living. Therefore, they relinquished control over the 25 percent of all catalogued remains at museums and other institutions that could be culturally affiliated with federally recognized tribes. Some tribes have reburied these remains, others have stored them, and some have asked institutions to continue to hold them.

In making arrangements to repatriate these culturally affiliated remains over the past 20 years, archaeologists and tribal leaders opened new lines of communication with each other.

This was a welcome development, because relations between them had been touchy, at best. Many American Indians had questioned the need for research on their ancestors’ bones, and considered archaeological digs to be insulting, or simple theft. Tensions were often high. I still recall the moment in 1979, when I was starting out in archaeology, that two young Paiute men approached me in a bar in Fallon, Nev., flashing knives, and warned me not to “dig up” their grandfather.

Today, many tribes have a more positive view of archaeology. More American Indians study the science today, and tribes have their own archaeology programs, and work with outside researchers. I am working with the Salish-Kootenai and Blackfeet tribes in Glacier National Park, in Montana, to study archaeological and paleoecological information in receding ice patches.

The new federal regulations undermine this progress. In an effort to repatriate the 124,000 sets of remains that cannot be affiliated with recognized tribes using current evidence, they ignore the importance of tribal connections to ancient remains — that essential common value that drew the tribes and the scientists together. Institutions must now offer to repatriate remains to tribes that have no demonstrable cultural affiliation with them.

In some situations, under the new rules, institutions are directed to simply “transfer control of culturally unidentifiable human remains to other Indian tribes” or, in clear violation of the law, “to an Indian group that is not federally recognized.” If all else fails, institutions can simply re-inter the unidentifiable remains near where they were found.

The main objective, it seems, is to get rid of the remains however possible, as quickly as possible. The regulations clearly undermine the law’s compromise, and Ken Salazar, the secretary of the interior, should rescind them.

Those who wrote the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act recognized that the older remains are, the more difficult it is to affiliate them with any modern tribe. But science continues to develop methods that can help determine cultural affiliation. This work should be allowed to continue. Someday, all the skeletal remains may be repatriated to their proper descendants. In the process we will have learned much, through archaeological analysis, about the dead, and much more, through dialogue between scientists and tribes, about the living.

Robert L. Kelly is a professor of anthropology at the University of Wyoming.

Despite the criticism of NAGPRA, museum professionals have to implement NAGPRA requests. These claims can present complicated problems of interpretation. Exactly how is cultural affiliation established when museum records lack this information? Tribes may have competing interests. NAGPRA regulations allow a tribe that had its “aboriginal occupancy” of certain territories validated in land claim cases to claim objects excavated there, even though the objects predate the tribe’s arrival. Yet, non-federally recognized tribes who can claim a cultural affiliation cannot repatriate objects under NAGPRA. When members of a tribe do not agree on a repatriation plan, consultations may be difficult for museum personnel. How are “religious leaders” to be identified? How is “sacred” to be defined. Such definitions can change over time, as can the kinds of objects that have central importance to a tribe. What are “grave goods?” In the case of mounds, not all were burial mounds, so identifying what objects are “unassociated” grave goods is difficult. Actually, there are conflicting views on such issues between Indians and scholars, scholars and scholars, and Indians and Indians.

Listen to Dawn Scher Thomae describe how the Milwaukee Public Museum prepared inventories of their collections for tribes

Despite these kinds of problems, museum professionals have found that the participation of Native people in consultations and negotiations has greatly contributed to their institutions’ missions. For tribes, repatriation has at a minimum humanized Native people by establishing their right to dignity and respect after death and to the practice of their religion and expression of their identity. NAGPRA treats human remains not as biological specimens but as cultural objects with meaning: these remains carry the history of the dehumanizing treatment of bodies, and, moreover, there is now a recognition from the wider society that funerary customs express continuing relationships between the dead and the living.

Listen to Dawn Scher Thomae, curator of anthropology, explain how the museum works with tribes