Native Americans use clout to reclaim artifacts

SANTA CATALINA ISLAND, Calif. - Nearly a century ago, an amateur archaeologist and showman named Ralph Glidden dug up Native American burial sites on Catalina and other Channel Islands off Southern California's coast.

To him, the human remains and relics were treasures to be displayed in the so-called Indian Museum he opened as a tourist attraction overlooking Avalon Harbor. It was a macabre place - and to Native Americans, highly offensive - with windows edged with toe, ankle, wrist and finger bones, shelves lined with skulls held up by leg and arm bones, and ceilings decorated with vertebrae and rosettes of shoulder blades. What Glidden didn't use in the museum he sold.

The museum closed in 1950, and many of those Native American remains - an array of skulls, bones and an estimated 30,000 teeth - sat in storage