UT works with Native tribes to return thousands of ancestors, objects home

Ellen Lofaro, director of repatriation for UT, said that ProPublica’s data, drawn from the National Park Service, focuses on one step of the lengthy process of repatriation.

Under the federal law, the first step of repatriation is the creation of inventories and summaries of all ancestors and funerary objects, which are submitted to the national NAGPRA office. Then, the process of consulting with tribal nations and receiving claims from the tribes begins. Once tribal and institutional representatives have met and consulted, a repatriation notice is drafted and published in the Federal Register. Only once these steps have been completed can the physical return of ancestral remains and objects begin.

ProPublica drew data from notices published in the Federal Register to determine how many ancestral remains had been made available for return.

Repatriation is a years-long process that relies on the development of relationships between museums and universities and tribal representatives. Anytime UT has hosted NAGPRA-related meetings, Lofaro, who holds a doctorate in anthropology, said the university has invited all 21 tribal nations with ancestral land ties to Tennessee.

Shortly after Lofaro took on her role as director of repatriation in 2020, UT received several large claims from tribal representatives, which represented around 15 years of work ahead.

“The scope of the work is a challenge,” Lofaro said. “We still have decades of work to complete these repatriations due to several factors, including Tribal consultation, the number of claims, and the formal paperwork process. Often, Native Nations will delay placing a NAGPRA claim until they have a suitable reburial area, which can take years, sometimes decades, to obtain.” reimagined its 22-year-old “Archaeology & the Native Peoples of Tennessee” exhibit as a space where emptiness and transition are put on display. and to land,” King said.

Renamed “Repatriation of Archaeology & the Native Peoples of Tennessee,” the exhibit features quotes from tribal representatives and many empty display cases which once housed hundreds of funerary objects.

The space is markedly candid in its presentation of the process of repatriation, which typically happens behind walls and archive doors. It also tells the story of how the ancestral remains came to UT and the museum, a history in which the Tennessee Valley Authority destroyed Native cultural sites before damning large swaths of the state for hydroelectric power in the 1930s. The university held a contract with the agency as a repository of exhumed remains and objects.

These contracts and the arrival of ancestors to UT happened before McClung Museum was opened in 1963. The museum has never displayed ancestral remains for public viewing.

The repatriation exhibit inhabits a space in transition, as the museum prepares for its upcoming exhibit titled “A Sense of Indigenous Place: Native American Voices and the Mound at the University of Tennessee,” which is scheduled to open in January 2025.

Lisa King, an associate professor of English at UT and an expert in Indigenous museum spaces, is leading the development of the exhibit, which will highlight the significance of the university’s oldest monument, a Native American burial mound on the Ag Campus which dates back to as early as 600 C.E., as well as Indigenous placemaking practices.

While some mainstay artifacts of the old exhibit — notably the too-large-to-move, 32-foot-6-inch canoe — will stay in the mound exhibit, many parts of the space will be updated.

As it has developed, the exhibit has received $445,000 from two grants, one from the Henry Luce Foundation and the other from the Terra Foundation for American Art. This funding will go towards the creation of the museum space and of a digital exhibit that will make the information and artifacts available to a much wider audience.

The work of returning ancestors and their sacred objects home is emotionally hefty, and it brings into play a central question about what kinds of knowledge non-Native peoples and non-members of tribal nations are allowed access to.

Miranda Panther, NAGPRA officer for the Tribal Historic Preservation Office of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, lives in the EBCI’s territory of the Qualla Boundary in western North Carolina and is married to a member of the tribe. Her job is to submit all repatriation claims and see the work of NAGPRA through to the end.

“It’s a human rights issue,” Panther said. “I think everyone should feel emotional about it, just imagining boxes upon boxes of people and their belongings just sitting on shelves waiting … for someone to care enough or be patient enough to be able to get them back.”

Panther has worked closely with King, Lofaro and the staff at McClung to organize meetings with tribal representatives and process the many rounds of paperwork required by law. But what she does not have access to as a nontribal member is the ceremony that comes at the end of repatriation: the return of ancestors back into the land that gave them life.

In 1990, Congress passed landmark legislation requiring government agencies, museums and universities to facilitate the return of Indigenous ancestral remains and funerary objects in their holdings to the tribes where they rightfully belong.

Over 30 years later, institutions across the country, including UT, are ramping up their efforts to comply with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, better known as NAGPRA.

UT sits among the institutions with the most Native American ancestral remains and funerary objects in its holding. Earlier this year, the nonprofit investigative journalism group ProPublica launched a multifaceted, data-driven series called The Repatriation Project, which revealed that UT places 7th in the nation for the most remains not yet made available for return to tribal nations.

As of Dec. 9, 2022, the university held 4,329 Native remains that had not yet been made available for return.

UT has made recent progress on repatriation through the NAGPRA process. Since 2016, the university has repatriated more than 2,100 ancestral remains and 15,000 funerary objects to Native tribes, increasing the university’s repatriation claims from 4% to 37% complete.

“We will continue to build relationships and consult with Native Nations every step of the way,” Lofaro said. “The work is important, and we are dedicated to continuing to make progress.”

Alongside staff and faculty at the McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture, Lofaro and the Department of Anthropology are currently working with four tribal nations: the Cherokee Nation, the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, all of which have ancestral land ties to Knox County.

McClung Museum has played a central role not only in facilitating the repatriation process, but in making the work visible and legible to a public audience. In August 2022, the museum

A visitor to the old archaeological exhibit may have left with the sense that Native American peoples’ history ended at colonization. In fact, timelines in the exhibit which compared historical periods in Tennessee to major world events ended at Columbus’s arrival in the New World. Murals on the walls, which will be removed in the new exhibit, depicted scenes of prehistoric Indigenous life in North America, including woolly mammoths and the production of arrowheads.

The exhibit did not present factually inaccurate information, but King said it told a curated story of Native peoples that did not include their lives in the present day. She hopes the new exhibit spaces, conceived in direct consultation with tribal nations, will tell a different story.

“Rather than having a visual representation of a frozen past, or an end, instead, you see culture coming in to the present, that Tribal nations are alive and they’re thriving and they’re still very much connected to culture, to practice

“We don’t have a specific ceremony for NAGPRA reburials because, you know, Indigenous people could have never imagined that their graves would be desecrated or robbed in the future, so they didn’t have any kind of ceremony set aside for that type of event,” Panther said.

Lofaro and McClung Museum recommend that students visit the repatriation exhibit to get a fuller sense of the emotional heft and importance of the process.

For Pilar Garcia, a senior studying English and the leader of the Native American Student Association, walking into the new space was an emotional journey.

Garcia, a descendant of the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians, was especially impacted by a quote from Johi Griffin Jr., historical sites keeper in EBCI’s Tribal Historic Preservation Office, which now covers an exhibit wall: “I believe that that there is no greater honor than having the responsibility of returning our ancestors back to where they belong, in Mother Earth and not on a shelf.”

“I came here with a friend and I saw how much had changed and I cried,” Garcia said. “I started crying right there.”