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Gabe is the National News Editor and works out of Washington, D.C. Have a tip? Send it to gabe@fingerlakes1.com.
Just a month ago, former Republican Sen. Rick Santorum, who’s currently a CNN contributor, sparked a viral controversy after insisting that “there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture” at a Young America’s Foundation event on Friday, April 23 later apologizing while claiming that he “misspoke” at the conservative gathering.
Before the faith-driven pilgrims filled with Judeo-Christian values who fled from England in the name of religious persecution initially landed at Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts around 1620, “we came here and created a blank state,” according to Santorum. “We birthed a nation from nothing.”
The statue of imperialist Cecil Rhodes at Oxford College. Photo by Stringer/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images.
Art Industry News is a daily digest of the most consequential developments coming out of the art world and art market. Here’s what you need to know on this Thursday, May 20.
NEED-TO-READ
Inside One Texas Museum’s Controversial Pandemic Response – The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston was praised for opening its new building in November in spite of the pandemic and a hurricane. The Nancy and Rich Kinder Building was part of a 10-year, $450 million expansion. However, some staff say that they did not feel safe going back to work at the time, and their concerns were not always accommodated. “The head of [human resources] was working from home when he denied my request to work from home,” one employee said. (
Shannon O’Loughlin is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and the chief executive and attorney for the association, which formed in 1922 to serve Indian Country by protecting sovereignty and preserving culture.
“Harvard tends to cause delay, refuses to make decisions. And often causes extensive burden on Tribes by forcing them to produce evidence of cultural affiliation so they have a long history.
O’Loughlin says she’s concerned Harvard-educated students would go on to other institutions and perpetuate the same harmful repatriation practices and procedures.
“They have developed their inventories out of alignment with what NAGPRA requires,” she said. “They ve done so by failing to consult with tribes before they completed their inventory process.”
5:30
The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act certainly has its flaws. But museums and Native cultural organizations look to the future of digital collections and repatriation.
The Alutiiq Museum, which is based in Kodiak, will begin to digitize its collection with the eventual goal of expanding and digitizing collections from other museums.
Museum collections curator Amanda Lancaster says they’re already using a database and have most of their object’s catalogued. We use a database called Collective Access, and they are designing. So we already have sort of the back end where we have all of our objects catalogs to some degree. And so “We ll be adding our ethnographic objects to this very specific part of the database. And then later, we d like to add Alutiiq collections that are around the world, so there s some at the Alaska State Museum all the way to France and Finland and beyond. And so we d like to just make all of these collections available to peo
Here’s former Larsen Bay resident and Alutiiq Museum executive director April Laktonen Counceller:
“It was the first time where our people really began to understand why it was so important to have control over our own cultural heritage and by extension, our ancestral remains,” Counceller said. “It took years and lots of lawyers.”
That repatriation request process began in 1987, and hundreds of those ancestors were put to rest in 1991.
The Smithsonian repatriation isn’t covered under NAGPRA. Instead the Smithsonian based its policy on a 1989 law that authorized the National Museum of the American Indian.
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One of the criticisms of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act is that it puts a huge burden of proof on Tribes who may not have access to the necessary records.