Indian Skeletons May Never Leave Museums

Aug. 10, 2001 -- When a huge truck filled with the bones of over 2,000 people left the Peabody Museum in Cambridge, Mass., last year, tribal members of the Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico started walking.

To commemorate the occasion, hundreds of pueblo residents walked some 80 miles to meet the truck near the site of their ancestors’ original graves, which had been excavated by archaeologists early last century. In a private ceremony, the remains were reburied in what was the largest repatriation of its kind.

While some ancestors of the Pueblo of Jemez have been returned to their intended resting places, the bones of nearly 200,000 other American Indians still sit in drawers and wooden boxes of American museums across the country. Many involved in the repatriation process say most remains will stay there, despite a federal law that requires federally funded museums to attempt to return them.

A Danger to the Living

Until 1990, when Congress passed the law, Indian remains were in the permanent collection of at least 700 museums across the U.S. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) requires federal agencies and museums to return Indian skeletons and many culturally vital artifacts to appropriate tribes, who determine what to do with the bones. In most cases, tribes say the remains will be reburied.

But a decade after it was passed, the remains of only 19,000 individuals, or about 10 percent of the Indian remains held in collections, have been returned. Museum officials say they are overwhelmed by the amount of material the law covers while tribes are inundated with notices from museums. And some tribal leaders say NAGPRA clashes with their traditional beliefs.

“Tribal elders don’t want us to handle the bones,” says Gerald White, the repatriation coordinator for the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe in northern Minnesota. He says the disturbed spirits of the dead can wreak havoc on the living. Ojibwe elders would rather have archaeologists or museum officials rebury the bones, says White.

Other Indian communities don’t want the remains returned to their land at all.

“Zuni don’t believe in repatriation [of skeletons] back to Zuni lands,” says Dan Simplicio, a member of the Zuni Pueblo tribal council in New Mexico. Zuni traditions require a ceremony to bury the dead, but there is no ceremony to rebury the dead, says Simplicio.

So far, the community hasn’t decided how to handle its ancestral skeletons. “They have been removed from a very sacred place that was never meant to be violated. Once they have been removed, we have a belief of spiritual contamination. Coming back means they bring that contamination with them,” he says.

The country’s largest Indian tribe, the Navajo Nation, doesn’t want the remains in museums but doesn’t have any alternative, says Alan Downer, director of historic preservation for the tribe. He says no remains will return until the chanters, the tribe’s traditional healers, have determined where the remains should go.

“In the Navajo traditional theories of disease,” says Downer, “one of the primary causes of illness is messing with the dead. The chanters look at this and say, ‘This is a big thing, and we don’t know how to deal with it right now.’”

Cleaning Up History

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, archaeologists and anthropologists saw new and exciting opportunities for study in Indian communities, the traditions of which they believed were becoming extinct. Funded both by museums and private individuals, expeditions crisscrossed the North American continent. Archaeologists took artifacts from ruins and dug up graves and their offerings, boxed it all up and sent it to the huge new museums springing up on the East Coast.

The intense interest in human biology in the mid-1800s was coupled with a branch of science — now utterly debunked — known as phrenology. It theorized that intelligence was based on race. Many of the Indian skulls obtained by museums were studied and compared to European skulls, which, parallel to the thinking of the day, were seen as the standard for high intelligence.

“Unfortunately, there was a very strong racial element to it,” says Tim McKeown, NAGPRA coordinator for the National Park Service.

The U.S. government was also interested in Native American bodies. In 1868, the Surgeon General asked army officers to collect Indian skulls, weapons and utensils “as far as they may be able to procure them,” and ship them back to Washington, D.C. The army studied dead Indian soldiers to see how modern bullets wounded the human body.

The army collected about 4,000 skulls from battlefields and graves. Those remains were housed in the U.S. Army Medical Museum, and eventually became part of the Smithsonian’s collection totaling about 18,000 individuals. (The Smithsonian is specifically exempt from NAGPRA, but must repatriate parts of its collection under a similar law, the National Museum of the American Indian Act.)

A Threat to Archaeologists

The push by Indians to reclaim parts of museum collections is closely linked to their past with the U.S. government and archaeologists. History has left many Indian people with an intense mistrust of those who want to study and document their lives.

But the passage of NAGPRA has turned that relationship on its head.

“Archaeologists look at NAGPRA as a real threat to their work,” says Christina Hellmich, a curator at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass. She says that while museums lose access to prized objects, most are working in good faith to comply with the law. “Native groups have a right to see what we have,” she says.

The Secretary of the Interior monitors the slow process of NAGPRA implementation. Museums send a series of general collection summaries and inventories to the National Park Service, delegated by the Department of the Interior to handle the process.

The museums then deal directly with the tribes. “They usually send a letter first saying they have items culturally affiliated with the Ojibwe,” says Gerald White. “They’ll say, ‘Would you like to see a listing?’ And we might say, yes, send us a picture of the item.”

The hundreds of museum inventories have meant that tribes can’t keep up with notices. White estimates he has gotten some 200 letters. “Tribes don’t have the staff, the time, the money to have people specifically assigned to these things,” he says.

All parties involved have been buried by the paperwork. The National Park Service has a backlog of perhaps two years of notices, complained tribal officials at a recent Senate Indian Affairs Committee hearing.

Museums have had to hustle as well. To comply with NAGPRA, they had to inventory their collections by 1995. But some, like Harvard University’s Peabody Museum, simply couldn’t meet the deadline and had to get extensions to complete the work.

“We have 8 million archaeological items just from North America,” says Barbara Isaac, repatriation coordinator for Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in Cambridge, Mass. Although not all of the artifacts are covered by the law, all 8 million must be inspected and catalogued to make sure, she says. “It’s a huge job,” says Isaac.

Insufficient Evidence

Despite the painstaking inventories, half of the human remains are still likely to stay in museums — not because tribes won’t want them back, but because the bones can’t be linked conclusively to one group.

“You can’t tell which tribe bones belong to if they are 500 years old,” says White. Because Indian groups have moved over the centuries, it is difficult, if not impossible, to determine the cultural affiliation of the remains with the information museums have.

Donations can also lack documentation, says William Billeck, an archaeologist in the Smithsonian repatriation office. “Sometimes it is just five skulls and the tribe, and we have no idea how the [collector] knew that,” he says.

Further, the legislation only requires that museums use their own records to determine the collections’ origin. Tribal officials say this doesn’t leave room for interpretation of tribal oral history, which they say should be given more attention when weighing evidence.

Museum officials say NAGPRA will affect how they run their institutions as long as Indian artifacts remain in their collections.

Tribal officials expect to be dealing with the law for generations and say they have a duty to ensure the return of their ancestors to the ground. To Alan Downer, there is no alternative. “In a perfect world, they would still be in the ground.”