29:04
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.