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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
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.
With a $32,578 grant from the US Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Sun’aq Tribe of Kodiak and the Alutiiq Museum are collaborating on a tool that will help people locate, view, and study Alutiiq objects in the world’s museums. The Amutat project, which started this month, will begin developing a database of ancestral Alutiiq objects […]