REMAINS, UNRETURNED

NARRAGANSETT INDIAN TRIBE WAS CHRONICALLY EXCLUDED FROM HAFFENREFFER’S REPATRIATION PROCESS, TRIBAL OFFICIAL SAYS

content warning: historical violence and Indigenous erasure

The late Narragansett ethnohistorian Ella Sekatau, mother of John Brown, taught native studies at Plimoth Patuxet’s 17th-century homesite. She had built the recreated Narragansett village from memory, constructing the wigwams and vegetable gardens that today line the centuries-old oaks. These days, John Brown, 64, is the Tribal Medicine Man and the founder and head of the Office of Historic Preservation of the Narragansett Indian Tribe.

Upon returning from school one afternoon in 1974, Mr. Brown told the College Hill Independent, he walked past his mother’s workstation and encountered a man on his knees before her. The stranger was “genuflecting and rolling around on the ground,” claiming that spirits were after him. Mr. Brown grabbed hold of a large stick, but when she saw her son, Dr. Sekatau just held up her hand.

That man—former Brown University Provost William S. Simmons—stood up and shook Mr. Brown’s hand before introducing himself. “From the instant I saw that man,” Brown said, “I never liked him.”

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Simmons is one of a long line of Brown University anthropologists who have had ties with and published research on the local Narragansett tribe. The university’s own Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology was named for one of these men, Rudolf F. Haffenreffer Jr. Built on Mount Hope in what is now the town of Bristol, the Haffenreffer Museum at first exhibited only Haffenreffer Jr.’s ethnographic collections. After his death in the 1950s, the Haffenreffer family donated the museum and its contents to Brown University— in direct opposition to the demands of the Indigenous community.

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), passed in 1990, provided a framework for federally-funded institutions to effectively repatriate Native American cultural items to their lineal descendants. But three decades after this landmark human rights legislation was passed, the nation’s most prominent museums and universities have failed to return the remains of over 100,000 people, according to a database published in January by nonprofit newsroom ProPublica.

Today, the Haffenreffer Museum contains an unknown amount of Native American remains. Professor Robert Preucel, director of the Haffenreffer Museum, told the Indy that the museum is in possession of “10 Narragansett ancestors [human remains] and 24 associated funerary objects.”

According to the ProPublica database, which aggregates institution-reported public records, the Haffenreffer Museum is still in possession of at least 99 Native American remains. This number includes the 10 remains that Preucel mentioned; this subset is what the Haffenreffer “made available for return” in a Notice of Inventory Completion filed with the government in 2018. Under NAGPRA, when an institution makes items “available for return,” it is supposed to mean that the institution has filed an inventory notice that viably associates the listed items with specific Indigenous communities.

But this bureaucratic process doesn’t always result in a successful repatriation. “Made available?” Mr. Brown said. “I’ve never seen them.” And the numbers presented by the ProPublica tool are, at best, a minimum estimate, as some institutions have failed to report remains in their possession.

“Who knows where the rest of the bones are,” Cora Peirce, a field investigator for Mr. Brown’s office and a member of the Pocasset Wampanoag Tribe of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, told the Indy

Asked about the estimated 90 percent of Native American human remains that the Haffenreffer has still not “made available” for repatriation, Mr. Preucel said, “I don’t know why they frame it that way because that’s not correct, at least in our case. We are happy to repatriate and are working right now to repatriate all of our Native American human remains.”

But John Brown told the Indy that Thierry Gentis, the Haffenreffer Museum’s head curator and NAGPRA coordinator, has refused to meet with Mr. Brown for nearly three decades. Apart from an attempted consultation in the mid-90s that Mr. Brown left in frustration after 15 minutes, Mr. Brown says he has “had no meaningful contact with anyone” from the Haffenreffer. He also said that he was unaware of the 2018 inventory notice, and was never consulted—despite the notice’s claim that its inventory was made “in consultation with representatives of the Narragansett Indian Tribe.”

Mr. Gentis declined to comment for this article, instead referring the Indy to Mr. Preucel.

Mr. Preucel told the Indy in an email that Thierry Gentis “consulted with Mr. Brown” at “multiple points in the years prior to publication” of the 2018 inventory notice. But Mr. Preucel declined to provide evidence of these pre-publication consultations, citing confidentiality requirements he said are part of the inventories section of NAGPRA (an Indy review of the statute found no confidentiality requirement for private institutions).

However, Mr. Preucel did provide the Indy with two emails from the Haffenreffer: one sent to Narragansett Tribe Chief Sachem Anthony Dean Stanton in September 2018, and the other sent to John Brown in October 2021. The first email, sent by Mr. Gentis two days after he filed the inventory notice, briefly notified the chief of the filing and offered Mr. Gentis’s phone number. Half an hour later, an email sent from Chief Stanton’s account acknowledged the filing, though Mr. Brown told the Indy that the chief does not remember sending this email.

The second email, sent by Mr. Preucel to Mr. Brown, thanked him for meeting with Brown University’s land acknowledgment group, expressed hope for future collaborations, and asked for Mr. Brown’s “advice on how best to proceed” with the “NAGPRA case,” which had been open since 2018. But Mr. Brown told the Indy that he missed the email in his packed inbox, and Mr. Preucel did not follow up.

“Because we received no response to either communication,” Mr. Preucel wrote in an email to the Indy, “our understanding was that they were not yet ready to proceed.” telling anybody anything about us.”

After receiving a list of questions from the Indy this week, Mr. Preucel reached out to Mr. Brown to apologize and reaffirm the Haffenreffer’s desire to meet with him.

Brown University has repatriated items to other tribes. For example, in February 2022, Mr. Gentis filed a “Notice of Intent to Repatriate Cultural Items” that described the Haffenreffer Museum’s successful consultation over a “catlinite pipe bowl and wood pipe” with the Stockbridge-Munsee Community of Shawano County, Wisconsin.

Later in his life, Mr. Brown said he met Simmons again, when he was an administrator, in his university office. “I asked him when he was going to do the right thing,” Mr. Brown said. “He thought it was funny.”

“[Simmons] was a thief, a liar, a purveyor of falsities, a prevaricator, and a robber of graves,” he continued. “That’s the man that Thierry Gentis and Russell Carey and all those other people followed. I don’t have a golden review for men who do that kind of stuff and then lie about it. But they were shielded by the power and the prestige of Brown University.”

NAGPRA was intended to compel institutions to repatriate their stolen belongings in consultation with Native American tribes. But the legislation’s biggest flaw is that museums and academic institutions have the final authority to “decide cultural affiliation,” Dr. Donna Rae Gould—the Nipmuc Nation of Massachusetts’s repatriation representative and executive director of Brown University’s Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative— told the Indy in an email.

“Too many institutions have used this to determine that ancestors are ‘culturally unidentifiable’ to resist repatriation,” she wrote. “In my opinion, this was the biggest compromise made when the Act was initially passed in 1990.”

NAGPRA’s verbiage provides institutions with a rationalization for keeping remains and cultural items on the shelves. Institutions are not required to begin the repatriation process for collections designated as “culturally unidentifiable.”

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William Simmons, who died in 2018, was a pillar of Brown University: once an undergraduate, he eventually became an anthropology professor, a department chair, and even a provost and executive vice president. He earned his master’s and doctoral degrees from Harvard University in the 1960s, centering his research on the Native American communities of New England. His 1989 book, The Narragansett (Indians of North America), was celebrated as an accomplishment in anthropology and historical scholarship. The information used to write his book largely came from the Narragansett people themselves— specifically, John Brown’s family.

“He took that knowledge from my mother and put it in his book,” Mr. Brown said. “It became his knowledge. By that time, we stopped

NAGPRA’s deference to institutional decision-making also means that the institutions alone determine affiliation when conflicting claims arise. In multiple interviews with the Indy, Mr. Brown alleged that Brown University has relied on counterclaims from groups with no credible connection to items in the Haffenreffer in order to delay repatriation. By creating a conflict of interest, he said, certain remains and objects can be held indefinitely in the museum’s collection.

The university’s acceptance of such counterclaims is also beneficial to the groups because the badge of institutional recognition can make it easier to obtain land trusts from the state, Mr. Brown suggested. “They served one another’s purpose.”

Haffenreffer anthropologists “helped create these people,” he said. “They gave them life and gave them substance. If they were a historic Indian tribe, we would have backed them. But they are people of unknown origin. Why do people want to be tribal or Indigenous when they’re not?” Mr. Brown believes the university is aware of the fictitious nature of some of these claims. “They would have to be. Brown is this institution of great learning. You mean to tell me they don’t know the law? Or the history? There’s no history there. None.”

Mr. Preucel did not respond to questions about the counter-claims. “We greatly value our relationship with the Narragansett Tribe,” he said. “We remain ready and eager to work with the tribe to complete repatriation.”

What’s more, Mr. Brown explained, institutions determining cultural affiliation often consult item catalogs that are based on skewed methodologies. Documented records reflect a largely European colonial perspective, leaving out oral histories and archaeological links used by Indigenous communities. “The catalogs are arbitrary,” Mr. Brown said. “I’ve yet to see an archaeologist or anthropologist or so-called historian have more knowledge about the tribal people in this area than the tribal people in this area.”

The Ivy League as a whole is built upon legacies of stolen land and stolen labor; Mr. Brown reflected on the proclaimed ‘civilizing’ logic of higher education that was designed not only to educate but to institutionalize Indigenous people. The erasure of Indigenous identities and dispossession of Native American land has been continually perpetuated and protected under the veil of academia. The lack of action on Brown University’s part to acknowledge this history belies its proclaimed commitment to “strengthening relationships with Indigenous peoples of this region,” as stated in the university’s 2022 Land Acknowledgement Commitments.

In a statement, the student organization Natives@Brown said they “support the ongoing efforts by the Narragansett Tribe.”

“Invariably, this work doesn’t change,” Mr. Brown said. “The people change. They retire, so forth. But the messaging and the methodology, that has not changed.”

Asked about the decades-long delay in attempting to reach Mr. Brown, Mr. Preucel told the Indy that the repatriation process has been stalled by staffing issues at the Haffenreffer Museum. Currently, Thierry Gentis acts as both the NAGPRA coordinator and head curator, limiting the time he can spend on repatriation work, Mr. Preucel said. (On the federal level, the U.S. Congress never sufficiently funded the office responsible for overseeing NAGPRA’s implementation.)

“We are hoping to make another hire,” Mr. Preucel continued. “I am speaking to the administration right now as we speak.” He added that the university has hired a consultant, Jan Bernstein, of the Colorado-based NAGPRA consulting firm Bernstein & Associates, to help guide the process of repatriation. According to its website, Bernstein & Associates in 2021 worked with the University of California, Berkeley, which has yet to return at least 9,000 Native American human remains, as well as over 200,000 associated funerary objects, according to the ProPublica database.

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In the state of Rhode Island, there is no administrative or legislative process for the acknowledgment of historical Indigenous tribes. The last piece of legislation referencing tribal recognition was passed in 1983, when the Narragansett Indian Tribe received federal recognition and began working to claim their land under a trust.

In 2007, the First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Bureau of Indian Affairs could place a 31-acre parcel of land in trust for the Narragansett nation. In response, the state of Rhode Island sued the Department of the Interior, seeking to maintain control of these tribal lands—and lost. Indigenous communities around the country had supported the Narragansett’s acquisition of the land trust; the court’s decision to affirm Indigenous rights under federal law was an important step in reinterpreting statutory language to include native sovereignty. However, it also illuminated the lengths to which state authorities will go in order to disregard and discredit the rights of Indigenous people.

This past year, in response to feedback from numerous Indigenous communities, the Department of the Interior proposed a series of revisions to streamline the repatriation process. These revisions would prompt more transparency from institutions about their collections and emphasize Indigenous groups as the authorities on cultural heritage.

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The visibility of repatriation efforts in the recent past has helped expose the violent history of some of the country’s most powerful and prestigious institutions. “This is less about recognizing or understanding heritage as it is about recognizing human rights violations,” said Dr. Rae Gould.

The Haffenreffer’s relationship with the Narragansett community serves as a reminder that museums and academic institutions are not neutral. The desecration of Indigenous people’s resting places has created a deep cultural pain that will only continue until the foundations of these institutions are rewritten.

“We are a patient people,” Mr. Brown said. “We were here when the people came over and we’ll be here when they leave.”

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This story comprises the preliminary results of an ongoing Indy investigation into the relationship between Brown University and the Narragansett Indian Tribe. We expect to report further on this topic in the future.

KEELIN GAUGHAN B’25 doesn’t want to become part of the problem.

SACHA SLOAN B’23.5 hopes for a stronger, more effective NAGPRA.

Instructions: Cut it out and give it to your Balentine <3

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Over the break, we went home. We confronted—we faced—and then we turned right back around. Now we reflect on those who we have again just left, the ones who love us and raised us and are always waiting for us to return. Preoccupied with new visions of old settings, we asked each other to elucidate revelations of this time, ones which inevitably centered on the world of family and the question of home. In its absence, the answer remains elusive.