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In early 2021, the Harvard Peabody Museum issued a statement apologizing for its reluctance working with Tribes to return some remains and funerary objects.
The social unrest of 2020 reignited the conversation of returning ancestral remains and sacred objects to their people.
Since contact, Indigenous people and settlers have had a contentious relationship, particularly as settlers appropriated items from traditional Native homelands. These items include totem poles, funerary and cultural objects – even remains of Indigenous ancestors.
Examples include in the late 1800s when the Edward Harriman Expedition removed a Teikweidi memorial pole from Southeast Alaska (1899). Or when anthropologist Aleš Hrdlička, a Czech-born anthropologist in the early 1900s known for unorthodox collection methods , such as stripping decomposing flesh from bones, or discarded the remains of an infant found in a cradleboard and sent it to the American Museum of Natural History.
Private museums could face NAGPRA scrutiny
Museums and other institutions that accept stimulus funds could be required to repatriate Indigenous artifacts and remains
Author:
May 16, 2021
Eighteen medicine bags from the Portland Art Museum s Native American collection are headed back to Montana. The museum, based in Portland, Oregon, has also worked to return cultural and religious items belonging to the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. (Photo courtesy of Portland Art Museum)
Museums and other institutions that accept stimulus funds could be required to repatriate Indigenous artifacts and remains
Nanette Kelley
Small museums and private institutions that accept federal CARES Act money or other stimulus funds could be forced to relinquish thousands of Indigenous items and ancestral remains now in their collections.
While news of the possession and mishandling of remains of two children of the MOVE family is considered abhorrent and shocking to many biological anthropologists, many of us â particularly Black and Indigenous biological anthropologists â were not surprised. This is not because we approve of the use of identified victimsâ remains in curation, display, or instruction. We do not. It is unremarkable because the structures that birthed and surround the practice of anthropology have their foundations in racist and colonialist ideologies. And until recently, academia and science have struggled to engage with these histories.
As biological anthropologists we recognize and are grateful for the contributions that research with the remains of past and willed individualsâ (those who have donated their body to science) has provided our understanding of human evolution, health, and history. We are also aware of the important insight forensic examinations can provide in asses
The discovery dubbed Browns Valley Man was judged to be roughly 10,000-year-old bones, some of the oldest, best-preserved prehistoric human remains ever found in North America.