Sacred work: Museums and universities must reunite ancestors’ remains with tribes.

Native American Heritage Month turns a spotlight on how we treat issues of importance to Indigenous peoples. Below: A former museum curator describes how museums and universities neglect the remains of ancestors and artifacts of tribes, rather than returning the items. Another view: An assistant professor specializing in Indigenous people’s history describes how U.S. political leaders fail to respect Native American governments.

Imagine your relatives’ bones stored in the basement of an unfamiliar university or museum. 

Boxes of ancestors and artifacts are often stacked on top of each other, for use in research, education or just curiosity. Mostly they are ignored or forgotten, left to collect dust.

When I first started working in museums, I thought they were magical places full of history, and that universities stood for truth and learning. But I soon realized that for Native people, these places can be painful. 

What I saw as saving history, others saw as losing it. What I thought was education, others felt was misrepresentation.

Ever since museums and universities were created in the U.S., Native peoples’ stories have been told by those who colonized their lands and spread harmful ideas. 

This led to more than 100 years of taking their heritage from them without permission. Museums and universities took hundreds of thousands of Native American human remains and millions of cultural items.

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, enacted in 1990, challenged these practices. It gave Indigenous communities a legal path to reclaim their ancestors and cultural belongings. California passed a similar law, the California Native American Graves Protection Act of 2001. 

Yet decades later, too little has been returned to tribes, and some institutions still resist, saying the items are needed for education or research.

I’ve worked in museums and universities for 25 years as a curator and collections manager. I’ve seen how cultural collections are treated. 

Museums only display about 1% of their collections; the rest is hoarded away in substandard storage. Universities have boxes of artifacts that haven’t been opened or studied since they were first collected.

I often had to fight for the basic care of collections. My concerns were ignored. I worked in storage rooms with leaking pipes. I’ve removed cultural materials from mold-infested containers. And I’ve tried organizing a warehouse of 5,000 boxes of archaeological material that had been ignored for years. 

At one museum, collections storage was removed from a new building plan, leaving the collection without a proper home.

So why do these places want to keep their collections? Many don’t have the money, interest or cultural knowledge to care for them. Most of the public will never see these things. 

And how can scientists understand this material if they don’t work with tribes?

Change is afoot. New rules for the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act passed last year. They make things clearer, remove roadblocks and require tribes to be consulted before items are shown or studied. 

Some scholars feel the changes are a threat to knowledge, but they are long overdue.

Today, repatriation doesn’t always mean removing items. Sometimes tribes work with museums and universities through “hold-in-trust” agreements. This means the institution keeps the items, but the tribe has legal control and decides how their cultural heritage is used or shared.

Each tribe has different views: Some are okay with display and research; others are not. Some items can be used for teaching; others cannot. It is about pausing to ask, listen and ideally work together.

Tribes are saying: “Nothing about us, without us.” They want to tell their own stories but are also willing to collaborate. It is here that knowledge can be transformed.

After the new regulations passed, many museums reassessed their Native American galleries. They are now actively consulting with tribes to tell authentic stories through Indigenous voices and perspectives.

The law also has led to more community-based archaeology. For example, in 2018, during the construction of their new museum in Palm Springs, the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians halted work after noticing a patch of dark soil. 

Thousands of artifacts were unearthed, and archaeologists helped identify the site as the oldest in the Coachella Valley. The tribe published a book about the discovery and now shares the story in their museum.

After years of trying to improve collections care, I chose to leave museums and universities, to help Native American tribes bring their ancestors and cultural items home. Today, I find meaning in watching tribal citizens connect with returned cultural items or helping rebury an ancestor held in storage for 100 years.

In my heart, I know this is the right thing to do. I hope as the new federal administration sets its priorities, this bedrock law remains in place.