US history blog

Celeste Nelson

Imagine if you were strolling through a museum that was full of ancient artifacts and ancestral remains, when suddenly you come upon an exhibit of the preserved remains of your great, great grandfather. How would you feel? I would feel pretty upset. My grandfather’s remains deserve to be treated with respect. No one considered the feelings of the descendants of the man. The fact that the museum is receiving money for digging up someone’s grandfather and putting him on display is morally wrong. This is how many Native Americans felt about their ancestors and cultural objects being dug up and put on display for educational purposes.

In a previous time, Native Americans could claim no ownership rights to artifacts that were taken from their land. Their burial grounds were dug up by archeologists and the findings were sent to museums across the country. Many artifacts were purchased, often below the value of the objects, or stolen from tribes.

Finally, a law was passed in nineteen ninety called the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. It reserved the rights of Native American lineal descendants, Indian tribes, and Native Hawaiian organizations with respect to the treatment, repatriation, and disposition of Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony. The law also mentions that’s the tribes can claim ownership of objects, and if a review determines that their claim is justified, then the ownership of the artifact is given. Unfortunately, it was not always so easy for tribes to claim their cultural item.

Although there were many counts of museums happily returning items back to the rightful tribes, there were also many counts of museums not willing to be so compliant. The University of Pennsylvania’s museum of Archeology and Anthropology had over forty items that the Tlingit people of Southeastern Alaska tried to claim. The museum would only give back eight items and allow the tribe to serve as a co-curator of the rest of the objects. The tribe said that they would not hesitate to take the museum to court if they did not come up with a better offer.

There were people who thought that returning items back to a tribe was not the answer. The late Clement W. Meighan, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, was one of those people. She saw returning bones and artifacts to the tribes so that they could rebury them as “The equivalent of a historian burning documents after he has studied them, thus, repatriation is merely an inconvenience that makes it impossible for scientists to carry out a genuinely scientific study of American Indian prehistory. An entire field of academic study may be put out of business.”

I stand by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. I think it is morally wrong to go digging up someone’s ancestors so they can be put on display. It is disrespectful to the Native Americans to treat their artifacts and ancestors as a means of business. Many Native Americans will benefit from this law and many artifacts and cultural items can be rightfully returned to tribes across America.