Loads of good stuff to talk about here! âs gonna get long, but I hope you take the time to read it if youâre interested in this stuff! Also please let me know if you canât see the links.Â
Iâve posted about it before, but the Field has an incredibly good repatriation department that actively does work with indigenous nations to get stuff home. But the goal isnât âempty the museum,â the goal is âpresent indigenous history in a way that represents what the native group actually wants.â Case in point: this totem pole.
I told the story of it here, but the gist is there was this really awesome but totally stolen totem pole and the people who made it rather wanted it back, so back it went- but then the museum commissioned a couple of native artisans from that same group to create a new totem pole to take its place. When done well, repatriationâs not just about giving stuff back- itâs about building relationships with the groups. A lot of Native American groups want archaeology and museum exhibitions to happen- they recognize the scientific and social value. But they also generally donât want to be objectified.Â
Another really good example of culture of origin reaction to repatriation/co-curation is the Maori response to the Fieldâs marae, or meeting house. The house was sold in the midst of a family dispute, and another one was constructed at the original site- and when the Field wanted to exhibit the house, their first point of contact was that family. One of the curators had been trying to talk to the descendants for years about the possibility of repatriation, but⊠ok, so this is another kinda sticky point about repatriation.
Not every object was stolen and/or excavated; some were actually sold- and there can be an enormous deal of shame surrounding past actions, which was the situation with the descent group for this marae. The fact that the museum bought is inconsequential to this shame- the shame here comes from the fact that it had been sold at all. A family elder/chief had sold it, and that was still a major source of family shame- like somebody selling Grandmaâs headstone. When the museum tried to reach out to them, for quite some time it was like rubbing salt in this still-present wound. To the Maori, these houses are alive- spirits dwell in them- and they still have incredible spiritual significance to the Maori today, and so what the museum and the Maori ended up doing was⊠honestly, something really spectacular.Â
They restored the marae and now itâs a home for Maori spirits in America.Â
No, really, itâs cool as hell. The original creatorsâ direct descendants were flown other and stayed in Chicago for a while while they talked with the Field curators about what to do with the marae. It was restored and painted- not the standard methods for archaeological conservation, but that was less important than keeping the house the way the Maori wanted it. Maori groups regularly come in and have events there, and we do what we can to help keep the spirits warm. Sometimes people even sleep in there, because the Maori asked for that. Now, the big repatriation law in the US- NAGPRA (the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act)- doesnât cover non-Native North American groups, but this is something that the Field finds important for a lot of reasons. Itâs not just about ethics- it improves the museum experience for guests as well. It adds context and shows cultural continuity for the creator cultures.Â
The Field also has co-curation in place pre-NAGPRA; the Pawnee Earth Lodge we have is a modern recreation that was built with the guidance of Pawnee elders back in 1977. Itâs been rededicated, and thereâs been drum circles and purification rituals held there by representatives of the Pawnee nation to cleanse the space. It would have been ethically tenuous to have a âgenuineâ earth lodge in the museum, but having one built for us that combines ancestral and modern Pawnee spiritualities and sensibilities is like I mentioned in the other post- itâs a way to show museum guests that Native Americans still exist and that these rich cultures and their traditions arenât some relic of an ancient past.
But thereâs a major design flaw in NAGPRA that makes repatriation extremely difficult sometimes, even when the museum itself wants to give stuff back. This barrier is the five year rule- basically, when NAGPRA was passed in 1990, museums had five years to identify all of the Native American stuff in their collections and list its tribal affiliation. In the bad old days of collecting, a lot of people didnât bother to take down the names of the folks they took stuff from, and thanks to the way the US laws regarding tribal enrollment work, group affiliation can change, be subsumed into larger groups, or just not be federally recognized. So a lot of material got classified as âculturally unidentified,â and some museums arenât making efforts to identify it. And legally, they donât have to, because they were supposed to get that done within that five year period. Five years is a tiny amount of time to get a bulletproof cultural affiliation on artifacts and remains- big natural history museums have millions of objects in their collections sometimes.
Now, I can say with absolute certainty that the Field is not doing that, because Iâve actually worked on some of this material. A few years back, I was working on a project to identify several hundred boxes of that âculturally unidentifiedâ stuff. These boxes were considered lowest priority because they only contained soil samples, rocks, animal bone, some lithic debitage, and ceramic potsherds, but the work still was important. When my chunk of the project was complete, our repatriation department sent notice to several of their native contacts. None of them wanted two hundred boxes of broken pottery back. Case closed- unless later on they decide they do want it, in which case now itâs been identified and so theyâll get it pretty quickly. Thatâs an example of a best-case scenario. When remains are involved, it gets a lot trickier. Sometimes two or more nations claim the same set of remains, or the museum drags its feet. Harvardâs Peabody Museum runs into this problem a lot- hereâs an article from a few years back, if you want some scope on this kind of problem. If the Wampanoag and the Narragansett clam the same remains, and their historical territorial affiliations overlap, and DNA testing isnât going to give a good outcome (some groups do not want DNA testing, and others are so closely related that haplogroup testing wouldnât really be helpful at all, plus admixture over the years can make DNA testing even more complex), whoâs in the right? Who gets the remains? Sometimes it works out- Kennewick Man, for instance, ended up buried in a location agreed upon by the groups that had claim to him, and most, if not all, of them participated in the interment ceremony. But other times, it doesnât- and the legal battles wage on, which can get real expensive real quick for the native groups and museums, especially smaller museums that donât have a big endowment. Fortunately, there are federal grants available to help. But this leads to another massive problem with NAGPRAâŠ
NAGPRA has some serious budget issues.
Do you know whoâs in charge of NAGPRA? Itâs the National Park Service! You know, the one that our current president is decimating? This means that NAGPRA grants (aka money to be given to people trying to get their stuff back or money given to museums to help ID stuff) have been substantially reduced as well. In fact, theyâve been 100% reduced! Thatâs right, our wizened yam of a president requested a whopping ZERO DOLLARS for repatriation grants! It does seem like they did get some funding, as they havenât closed down grant application- but I hope this stands as an illustration of the potential seriouness of this problem. In addition, part of the legal requirement for repatriation is publishing inventory completions and intents to repatriate in the Federal Register, and thereâs a massive backlog of those.Â
Finally, the actual repatriation process does take some time. The NMAI has a really cool guide to safe repatriation online here; you really canât just hand over the stuff and say âsee ya! youâre on your own!â A lot of itâs actually poisonous, thanks to the old-timey pest treatment called âcovering it in arsenic until the bugs are dead.â Â
If youâd like more information about native responses (at least in the US), I highly encourage you to check out NATHPO, the National Association of Tribal Historical Preservation Officers. This organization advocates for better repatriation processes, increased repatriation budgets, and better repatriation training, as well as conservation training for native groups who do get objects back and want to preserve them (as opposed to remains that theyâd like to perform funerals for).Â
