LOST AND FOUND: NAGPRA, Scattered Relics, and Restorative Methodologies

Abstract

This research examines the disarticulation of Native American funerary assemblages in museum collections and highlights the challenges of identifying them for inventories mandated by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990. Indigenous objects and human remains from burial sites were routinely subjected to collecting and sorting procedures that stripped them of meaning and context. NAGPRA does not, however, require museums to reassemble sites or locate related materials housed in other institutions. As a result, associated funerary objects and human remains can easily be “lost” in collections and tribal representatives may be unable to find them. This paper samples the evidence from the Middle Connecticut River Valley to illustrate how items were routinely excavated and categorized and proposes a few restorative methodologies for their recovery.

Specimens as individuals: Four interventions and recommendations for great ape skeletal collections research and curation

“…[160][161][162] For example, researchers in high-or uppermiddle-income countries have been found to contribute 97% of paleontological fossil data. 155 Museums receive requests for collections to be repatriated, especially Indigenous human skeletal remains and cultural objects, 28,[30][31][32][163][164][165] but this is rarer for nonhuman natural history collections. South African scholars have argued for physical F I G U R E 3 Box plots of femoral mid-shaft (50%) polar section modulus (F50Zpol) comparisons between human populations, fossil hominins, and apes.…”

“…Museums receive requests for collections to be repatriated, especially Indigenous human skeletal remains and cultural objects, 28,30–32,163–165 but this is rarer for nonhuman natural history collections. South African scholars have argued for physical repatriation of biological specimens from natural history collections in the Global North to the Global South 166 .…”

“We call it put him away”

“…Though our documentation effort was dedicated specifically to identifying Delaware funerary objects, our ethnographic approach is offered here as an alternative method that can be broadly applied for documenting the funerary nature of any Native American collection according to NAGPRA. As our study and a growing body of literature demonstrate, using such an ethnographically informed approach holds the potential for more accurately revealing the funerary nature of curated objects and provides the mechanism through which meaningful consultations can be maintained early on in the documentation process (Beisaw, 2010; Bruchac, 2010; Clark and Custer, 2003; Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Powell, 2012; Dongoske et al., 1997; Dumont, 2011).…”

Coming Home to Nez Perce Country: The Niimiipuu campaign to repatriate their exploited heritage By Trevor JamesBond, Pullman: Washington State University Press. 2021. 216 pages. $24.95 (Paperback)

“…In a museum catalog, as Bond illustrates, Western cataloging practices, descriptive terminologies, and thumbnail photos have transformed these into objects for study and display. In this way, the Spalding‐Allen collection at the center of the book and the community's claims has a familiar story to many in museum collections: undergoing a long, somewhat meandering line of exchanges and transfers that exponentially disconnected it from the community and original knowledge bearers (Bruchac, 2010; Henare, 2005; Marsh, 2015; Nichols & Parezo, 2017). Missionary Henry Spalding collected these “curiosities” and shipped them to another collector, who donated them in 1893—fittingly perhaps the same year as the triumphant World's Columbian Exposition that celebrated such colonial exploits (Cronon, 1992; Hinsley & Wilcox, 2016)—to Oberlin College, which then transferred them to the Ohio Historical Society in the 1940s, which in turn loaned them to the National Park Service in the 1970s.…”