Content Warning: This week’s newsletter is heavy, and hard for me to formulate my thoughts. Below are segments from linked articles with more information on each subject. What’s important to take from this is that we have a long way to go regarding repatriation. The work is just getting started, and some institutions are less responsive than others. This doesn’t even begin to cover the enormous, incalculable private collections; I touch more on that in my previous newsletter here:
The National Park Service (NPS) has announced $3.4 million in grants to 16 Native American tribes and 28 museums to assist in the consultation, documentation and repatriation of ancestral remains and cultural items as part of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). This is the largest amount of funding appropriated for NAGPRA grants since the act was passed in 1990 and the funding program began in 1994.
NAGPRA provides systematic processes for returning human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects or objects of cultural patrimony to Native American and Alaska Native Tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations.
A total of 21 grants to seven Native American tribes and seven museums will fund the transportation and return of human remains comprising of 11,354 ancestors, more than 10,400 funerary objects and 39 cultural items.
House Bill 3413, sponsored by State Rep. Mark Walker, D-Arlington Heights, amends the Human Remains Protection Act to require the Illinois State Museum and other institutions to work with federally recognized tribes to rebury Native American bones and artifacts. Many Native American remains were dug up many years ago by the Department of Transportation during highway and road construction.
A second bill signed by the governor – HB1633, sponsored by state Rep. Maurice West, D-Rockford, – makes Native American history part of the standard public school curriculum in Illinois.
A third bill – SB1446 sponsored by state Sen. Suzy Glowiak Hilton, D-Western Springs, – protects the rights of Illinois students to wear accessories that reflect cultural, religious, or ethnic heritage at graduation ceremonies. Nimkii Curley, a Native American high school senior, was forced to sit out his graduation ceremony because he wanted to wear an eagle feather and beads on his graduation cap.
The bones of several hundred Native Alaskans are reburied in Larsen Bay in 1991 after local residents sought to have the remains returned by the Smithsonian Institution for years. (Marion Stirrup/AP)
In 1989, Congress passed legislation creating the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, requiring the institution to inventory its Native American remains and send those lists to relevant tribes. About half of the remains held by the Smithsonian are Native American, officials said.
The following year, a more extensive repatriation law for Native American remains was passed for all museums that received federal funding, except the Smithsonian’s. That law also required those museums to notify tribes about their Native American holdings, and that those notices be published by the secretary of the interior. The law also created a committee to report progress on repatriations to Congress.
For about two decades, the Smithsonian did not publicize its progress on repatriating Native American holdings. In 2012, the Smithsonian began providing Congress with the information at the recommendation of the Government Accountability Office.
The Smithsonian has no obligation to offer repatriation for what it refers to as “culturally unaffiliated remains,” which are Native American remains that were not determined by the museum to be from a specific federally recognized tribe or Native Hawaiian community. In 2020, however, it adopted a policy to review repatriation requests for those remains.
Like the Smithsonian, museums across the world are grappling with their collections of human remains. In Philadelphia, community protests recently pushed the Penn Museum to take steps to bury the skulls of likely enslaved Black Philadelphians that were part of collections by Samuel George Morton, a world-renowned scientist from the University of Pennsylvania.
Bill Billeck, the former program manager of the Natural History Museum’s domestic repatriation office, said the office’s workload and limited staffing often prevent it from initiating contact with families and other groups. The office, which has an annual budget of about $1.5 million, is handling 13 repatriation claims that include about 2,000 sets of human remains.
“Sometimes we can be proactive in our assessments,” said Billeck, who recently retired. “Other times, we’re just reactive because there’s enough work for us to do. We don’t have enough staff.” He commended the institution’s progress on repatriation, saying that the Smithsonian has some of the “largest responsibilities” worldwide. “I don’t think any other museum in the country comes close to how much we’ve done,” he said.
A ProPublica investigation published in January found that at least three institutions with far fewer human remains than the Smithsonian — the Interior Department, the University of Alabama and the Tennessee Valley Authority — have returned or made available for return over 10,000 remains each, more than the 6,322 sets of remains the Natural History Museumsaid it has returned or offered for repatriation. Even when remains are repatriated, some people are still haunted by the harm done to their ancestors. In 2007, the Smithsonian returned the brain of a 10-year-old boy to a Tlingit family from Sitka, Alaska. The youngest of six children, George Grant had died in 1928 of tuberculosis in a government hospital in Juneau, where Firestone then removed his brain.
Grant’s brain is now buried in a family cemetery in Sitka, but his body is in an unmarked grave 90 miles away in Juneau. Lena Lauth, the granddaughter of Grant’s late sister, said she cannot forgive the Smithsonian. “How could they hold a child’s brain for 70 years, and know who he is?” she said. “It was my grandma’s pain, and now that she’s gone, it’s my pain.”
Stepping into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Shyanne Beatty was eager to view the Native American works that art collectors Charles and Valerie Diker had been accumulating for nearly half a century. But as she entered the museum’s American Wing that day in 2018, her excitement turned to shock as two wooden masks came into view.
Beatty, an Alaska Native, had worked on a radio documentary about the two Alutiiq objects and how they and others like them had been plundered from tribal land about 150 years ago. Now, the masks were on display in the biggest and most esteemed art museum in the Western Hemisphere. “It was super shocking to me,” she said.
The Met’s ownership history for the masks, also known as provenance, omits more than a century of their whereabouts. Historians say the masks were taken in 1871. But the museum’s timeline doesn’t start until 2003, when the Dikers bought them from a collector. Ownership was transferred to the Met in 2017.
The Dikers, who have amassed one of the most significant private collections of Native American works, have been donating or lending objects to the Met since 1993. In 2017, as other institutions grappled with returning colonial-era spoils, the Met announced the Dikers’ gift of another 91 Native American works.
A ProPublica review of records the museum has posted online found that only 15% of the 139 works donated or loaned by the Dikers over the years have solid or complete ownership histories, with some lacking any provenance at all. Most either have no histories listed, leave gaps in ownership ranging from 200 to 2,000 years or identify previous owners in such vague terms as an “English gentleman” and “a family in Scotland.”
Experts say a lack of documented histories is a red flag that objects could have been stolen or may be fake.
“That’s a lot of missing documentation, which is a problem,” said Kelley Hays-Gilpin, a curator at the Museum of Northern Arizona. The Arizona museum has documented about 80% of its collection, as has the Brooklyn Museum and other institutions that are considered less prestigious than the Met but that have substantial Native American collections. Some museums, such as one at the University of Denver, decline gifts that have poor provenance.
