The Smithsonian’s exemplary Museum of the American Indian.
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One
of the two Buddhas of solid gold found in the Emperor’s bedroom (of the summer palace
in Beijing) . . . was for Napoleon III. The other fell to the share of the English.
. . . We were the victors and therefore all objects of value belonged to our nation.
Count
d’Herisson, commander of the Anglo-French forces in China (1839-1898)
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“The day the carving came back, people were crying and weeping. This is not just
art to us.” |
A
spirit of mutual respect has grown between Native Americans and U.S. museums thanks
to a law enabling tribes to repatriate the artefacts and remains of their distant
ancestors
On a cold afternoon
a little more than a year ago, members of several Tlingit Indian clans in southeastern
Alaska gathered for an emotional ceremony that few of them had ever dared to imagine.
An intricately carved wooden beaver that plays a central role in their history and
culture was coming home after an absence of nearly a century.
This carving once graced the prow of a war canoe that ferried supplies to these clans
in the wake of a bombardment of their communities by the United States Navy in 1881.
One clan member, acting on his own, later sold it to a travelling collector, and
it disappeared.
In 1998, a clan elder was visiting a storeroom at the American Museum of Natural
History in New York when, he later recalled, he heard an “inner voice” calling him
to one shelf. When he found the shelf, he was astonished to see the wooden beaver
staring out at him.
Under the provisions of a sweeping law enacted 10 years ago, Tlingit clans asked
the museum to return the carving, and museum officials complied. “The day it came
back, the whole village was at the dock,” said Leonard John, a clan member who helped
arrange the return. “People were crying and weeping. This is not just art to us,”
John continued. “It’s something far deeper, something with a healing and spiritual
aspect. When our artefacts were scattered across America, they left a void. We lost
our honour and our value system. We were overwhelmed by social problems like suicide
and alcoholism. Now that they’re coming back, people look at them and feel their
honour and their self-respect returning as well. There are still a lot of festering
wounds, but the process of healing has begun.”
The law under which the beaver prow was repatriated, the Native American Graves Protection
and Repatriation Act, was signed by President George Bush in November 1990 after
years of discussion among scientists, museum curators and Indian groups. It seeks
to reconcile two profoundly different value systems, one based on the primacy of
reason and science and the other revolving around spiritual and religious values.
Under the law, every museum and federal agency that owns Native American artefacts
or remains must compile an inventory of its holdings, identify them by tribal origin,
and notify existing tribes of objects that appear to come from that tribe’s tradition.
U.S. museums hold the remains of an estimated 500,000 Indians as well as millions
of artefacts. Since the repatriation law was enacted, according to the National Park
Service, they have returned about 20,000 sets of human remains and more than 385,000
objects.
Specialists say this number is misleadingly high because it includes every bead and
pottery shard found in an Indian grave. But among them are also hundreds of important
and beautiful artefacts that have been prizes in museum collections.
“Some people argue that this is religion trying to assert itself over science, but
we don’t see it that way,” said Keith Kintigh, president of the Society for American
Archaeology. “Our position is that there are Native American rights, but that science
and research are also legitimate. They have to be balanced. That’s exactly what the
law tries to do, and I think it’s been pretty successful.
“Take these beautiful pottery vessels that were interred with Indians a thousand
years ago,” Kintigh said. “On the one hand, there are people who think those objects
should be underground beside the people they were buried with. But most museums with
Indian collections display funerary objects. They’re enormous cultural achievements
and have a lot to tell us. In many cases, they’ve even been used as models for the
revival and continuation of traditional artistic styles.”
Since the law was passed, tribal officials have held countless meetings with curators,
who have generally learned to view objects in their collections in a new way. Indians
have also conceded that it is sometimes best to leave their artefacts in collections
where they can be seen and appreciated. In a few cases, they have allowed museums
to keep sacred objects on the condition that they be handled in special ways. Some
must be kept out of public view, others must only be displayed facing in a particular
direction, and still others must be sprinkled regularly with substances like chopped
tobacco or corn pollen.
The Field Museum in Chicago, which has one of the country’s richest collections of
Indian artefacts, has returned about a dozen in recent years. It is now preparing
to repatriate one of its prizes, a towering totem pole depicting an eagle, a thunderbird
and a bear, to the Cape Fox tribe in Alaska. The pole was taken from an abandoned
village in 1899. “It was never the intent of the legislation to bring in trucks and
haul away museum collections,” said Jonathan Haas, a curator at the Field Museum.
“It was intended to provide a mechanism for the return of a very small number of
very important pieces that never should have been taken from their place of origin
in the first place.”
The repatriation process has not proceeded without problems. Many Indian tribes do
not have the financial resources to organize claims for sacred objects. Others are
so preoccupied with protecting Indian cemeteries that are uncovered during floods
or road-building that they do not have enough energy left to deal with objects that
are safe in museum vaults. Some objects that tribes would like to claim have been
treated with chemical preservatives, including arsenic, that make them toxic and
unsuitable for ceremonial use.
Another problem has been raised by some Indian leaders who maintain that all objects
from non-European cultures in North America belong in the hands of Indians. The 1990
law, however, rejects that so-called “pan-Indian” argument. It requires that the
claimant tribe prove it is a “lineal descendant” of the tribe from which the artefacts
or remains came.
As a result of this provision, the law has served some tribes better than others.
Southwestern tribes like the Hopi and Navajo, for example, have maintained cultural
continuity over centuries and therefore have strong claims to objects in museum collections.
Others, including many in the eastern U.S. that were decimated by waves of European
settlement, have more trouble proving their descent from tribes that existed long
ago.
Another major conflict remains over efforts by some tribes to recover remains that
are many thousands of years old and that scientists say should be studied for vital
clues about the history of human migration to the American continent. But many curators
have come to agree that Indians have a right to recover their sacred artefacts and
the bones of those they can legitimately claim as ancestors.
This kind of change in perception represents the law’s greatest contribution, according
to experts like Rick West, a Cheyenne Indian and curator of the Smithsonian Institute’s
National Museum of the American Indian in New York City, widely considered to be
the finest in the world. The museum has returned about 2,000 objects to Indian tribes
across the U.S., in Canada and in several Latin American countries.
“As institutions of culture, museums that house these materials have a vital interest
in buttressing those cultures and supporting them into the future,” West said, adding
that “this process has directly benefited museums themselves. Even a collection as
great as ours is very spottily documented, and through this process of repatriation
we’ve had people from native communities visiting our collection who can inevitably
tell us a great deal about objects that are not subject to repatriation.
“When the law was first enacted in 1990 there was practically hysteria in some parts
of the museum community about what was going to happen,” West continued. “Now most
of that has faded away. Both sides have been deliberate and thoughtful, and it has
ended up benefiting both the native and museum communities. This is not just words.
It has real impact.” |
