THE POINT-COUNTERPOINT PUBLICATION FOR DECEMBER 1, 2010
POINT NAGPRA Spurs Potential Collaboration Between U-M Museum and Native Tribes DR. CARL A SINOPOLI
The University is in compliance with recent NAGPRA revisions yet laments loss to research.
Volume 24 Issue 9
For many years, issues around repatriation and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (nagpra) have been topics of serious concern and stirred intense emotions across our campus. Unpacking the complexity of competing views on these issues and forging steps towards collaboration across differing perspectives are not well served by continued polarization, especially in a university community dedicated to serious and respectful engagement with difficult issues. The Museum of Anthropology supports nagpra. This federal legislation, passed in 1990, created a structure for the repatriation of Native American skeletal remains, funerary objects, sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony from museum collections to tribes to which they are related. nagpra requires museums to take inventory and report on nagpra relevant collections to tribes and US Department of Interior; this includes consulting with tribes and working to determine, when possible, the “cultural affiliation” of collections in their keeping. nagpra sought to balance two indisputable goods: the good of tribes seeking to reclaim the remains of ancestors and sacred objects housed in museum collections; and the good of scholars, museums and the larger public interested in the preservation and study of the human past. The regulations also recognized that not all human remains or nagpra-related objects can be affiliated with present day Indian tribes. Some may be too old; others have too little information about where they came from or when they date to; and many prehistoric archaeological “cultures” cannot be straightforwardly mapped onto contemporary or historically documented tribal groups and territories. New research may allow affiliation, but until then such remains are considered “culturally unidentifiable.” The “Culturally Unidentifiable Human Remains” (cuhr) from Michigan have been the source of tensions and conflicts here at the University of Michigan. Who do they belong to? How does one decide? Should they be retained by museums or transferred to tribes and, if so, which tribes? How should competing claims be reconciled? In May 2010, additions to the regulations specifically addressing cuhr went into effect. These additions no longer acknowledge the “good” of knowledge or research on the past; instead, they specify that all nagpra-related human remains should be transferred to tribes, and that, in the absence of cultural affiliation, recipient groups should be based on historic territories and geography. The University has adhered to nagpra since it became law and will continue to do so though I personally admit to sadness that research on the past is no longer considered a “good” under the expanded regulations and regret the losses to knowledge that will inevitably occur as a result. I have written this commentary as a dry scholarly statement rather than an impassioned defense of sci-
ence, archaeology, or the Museum of Anthropology. And I do this deliberately. I am an archaeologist, and I come to my discipline with profound respect for the rich diversity of the human past, a past that I believe is both knowable and worth knowing. My research is on the past of southern India beginning some 3000 years ago. There, as here, archaeology is controversial—various nationalists and religious communities passionately debate different interpretations. Yet archaeological evidence—the places, objects, plant and animal remains and, yes, the remains of human bodies—provides powerful and unique material evidence to scientifically assess completing claims and document the history and diversity of past societies. Much of our human story occurred before people wrote things down; many aspects of past cultures were never the subject of oral histories or religious knowledge passed down from parent to child over generations, and some people who lived in the past have been forgotten with no descendents to speak for them. Archaeological practices provide means, often the only means, to study important aspects of our human story over the many millennia of our history. This is, to me, a good and worthwhile thing to do. Ultimately, solutions to the current tensions lie not in an “either-or” dichotomy but in the “with” and “and” of cooperation. We all have an interest in respecting the rights of Native communities and in learning about the past. Collaborations between archaeologists and tribes, including tribal archaeologists, chart a way forward. Examples include recent studies in Alaska in which tribal members provided DNA samples to anthropologists to explore their relatedness to the 10,300 year old remains of a man excavated in British Columbia, or the decision by the Southern Cheyenne Tribe that culturally affiliated funerary objects from a nineteenth-century child burial should remain at the Smithsonian to educate “our children and future generations.” I and others in the Museum of Anthropology look forward to moving past the current drama and beyond the attacks of individuals and groups that make it difficult to respectfully acknowledge, understand, and address some very real and important differences in order to move forward in this difficult terrain in collaboration with tribes from Michigan and the other 36 states from which the Museum currently holds nagpra-related remains and objects. A complete version of Dr. Sinopoli’s piece is online, at consideronline.org, where you can also find the current nagpra legislation. The author is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan and the director and curator of Asian Archaeology and the Museum of Anthropology.
COUNTERPOINT NAGPRA Finally Returns Remains and Rights to Native Tribes The 2010 revisions to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (nagpra) requires museums and institutions that receive federal funding, including the University of Michigan, to return all Native American human remains and cultural objects excavated or discovered on federal or tribal land. This extends to returning remains and artifacts already in the possession of such institutions. The language in the original piece of legislation only required tribally affiliated remains to be returned; the University made little attempt to repatriate over 1000 unidentified remains in their possession while other institutions, like Michigan State University, played an active role in identification and repatriation. It was not until under President Obama’s administration that nagpra’s intent was made clear—all remains must be returned and identified. To identify the affiliation of these remains and items, the institutions holding them are responsible for consulting lineal descendants, Indian tribes, and Native Hawaiian organizations by sending notices to these groups describing the cultural artifacts. This inventory applies to all remains and cultural objects acquired at any time, before or after November 16, 1990 when the original Act passed. The recent clarifications to nagpra highlight the necessity of archeologists and other research institutions to fully respect Native American rights. It seems absurd that nagpra needed to be enacted at all. If there are any remains in possession of a federally funded institution that have a known affiliation to a tribe, it should go without question that any funerary or sacred objects—objects of cultural patrimony-and especially human remains should be in possession of the known tribe, rather than in storage or on display in museum collections. The University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology identified nagpra material in over 250 of their collections, human remains and funerary from 15 archaeological sites, and more than 300 items from their ethnology and ethnobotanical collections. Since the original nagpra passing, human remains of 32,000 individuals along with hundreds of thousand of funerary objects have been returned to their associated tribes. The University is far behind. I applaud their compliance with recent revisions, as returning remains from these sites is extremely important to Native American rights. The fact that so many Native American graves with a known tribal affiliation have been excavated is appalling. Historically, protection by state law only extended to marked graves. Problems arise due to the tendency of Native American graves to traditionally be unmarked or marked with biodegradable material or the planting of something above the grave, rendering them virtually unmarked. Despite these older graves lacking markers, their importance to a tribe remains no less important; it signifies the connection of the people to the land. There is no more spiritual way to show a certain area of land is both yours and your ancestors than by having your relatives remain in it forever. Removing human and cultural remains
from a tribe’s land serves to further remove them from their ancestral history. Furthermore, burial practices of tribes are strongly joined with their religion and removing these remains from their burial is a desecration of the tribe’s religious beliefs. In attempting to find a balance between the concern of Native Americans to have their ancestral remains be treated respectfully and scientists’ interest to study those remains and cultural objects, the statute groups the remains and objects in two categories: inadvertent discovery and planned excavation. If remains are inadvertently discovered, then consultation with the tribes connected to the land where the discovery was made is immediately required. If planned excavations may affect burials, federal officials must consult with the tribal officials during the planning of the project. In the case of archaeologists, nagpra allows a short time period for analysis of findings before the artifacts are required to be returned to their associated tribal group. Upon determining that the remains are Native American, analysis cannot be continued without documented consultation or tribal consent. nagpra is an extremely important piece of legislation for Native American rights. Arguments that human remains and cultural objects should remain in possession of museum collections in order to be further studied are unethical and preposterous. The removal of these remains and objects is most often an infringement on religious practices and therefore done in violation of the First Amendment. Additionally, the magnitude of remains that were previously being withheld without consequence from their tribes is enormous. Many remains have been in possession of research institutions for decades, so the argument that they must be kept for research is frustrating. Any research proposed by archeologists that is pertinent to these remains could have already been done. Consequently, it can only be assumed that they have instead remained in storage rather than being researched or returned. The rights of Native tribes need to be more elevated and respected. The revisions to nagpra not only mandate this, but also subvert a legacy of archeologists devaluing or disregarding Native American rights.
K ATE HEFL ICK
The University’s compliance with recent revisions to NAGPRA champions Native American rights.
The author is now concentrating in Program in the Environment, but had originally majored in Anthropological Archaeology. She has participated as a student and a research assistant in an archaeological field course with Professor Meghan Howey, a scholar on Native American issues, at the U-M Biological Station.
December 1, 2010
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FIVE THINGS About Native American Rights nagpra is short for the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. It was passed as US federal law November 16, 1990 and requires federal agencies and institutions that receive federal funding to return Native American cultural items and human remains to their respective peoples. Before revisions to nagpra, the University was one of the only institutions in the state of Michigan to withhold Native remains and artifacts. umgraveinjustice.wordpress.com
Under nagpra, only federally recognized tribes receive repatriated remains; if a museum chooses to return remains to an unrecognized tribe, they must propose a request for review to a federal committee. National Park Service
The President of the U-M Native American Student Association celebrated the revisions to nagpra and is quoted as saying “I’d like to see my ancestors go back to their graves as soon as possible.” Turtle Talk
For Native remains are held in museums outside the US, nagpra offers no recourse for repatriation. National Park Service
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