Sacred Sites and Repatriation, Revised Edition

By Joe Watkins

Examine an issue of paramount concern to Native American communities—repatriation—as it relates to sacred sites. This topic is explored in detail from both sides of the ongoing debate.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chelsea House
• Release date: Jun 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781438194011

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Sacred Sites and Repatriation, Revised Edition

Copyright © 2019 by Infobase

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Contents

Chapters

Repatriation Issues Overview

Repatriation

Repatriation Legislation

Repatriation and Anthropology

Repatriation and Museums

Repatriation Concerns

Reclaiming Sacred Sites

Conclusions and Hope for the Future

Chapters

Repatriation Issues Overview

Think about your earliest memories of Thanksgiving. Remember the stories of how the Pilgrims, starving that very first winter in America, were saved by the Indians? Remember the story of Squanto, the Indian who taught the Pilgrims how to plant corn kernels and to use fish as fertilizer to make the corn grow better? If you remember those stories, you will realize how great a role American Indians played in helping the Pilgrims to survive and flourish.

But there are other stories that are rarely told. These tell about how some of the Pilgrim explorers, soon after arriving in their new land, happened upon a grave. They dug into it and found the bones and skull of a man and the bones and skull of a small child, along with some cultural objects that had been placed with the bodies. One of the discoverers wrote that they took some of the prettiest things away and covered up the bones again. By November 19, 1620, only eight days after the Pilgrims had first anchored off eastern Massachusetts, American Indian graves had already been plundered for their contents.

Of course, grave robbers and looters are not the only people who are interested in the things left behind by early populations of North America. Anthropologists and archaeologists often collect bits and pieces of items left behind by inhabitants (called artifacts) as part of their research. These materials, when studied by scientists, provide information that helps them to better understand the cultures that lived in North America before the Europeans arrived. Museums also view the preservation of objects from the past as a part of their duty, because those items can be used to help teach people about all the different cultures that once existed or that currently exist in the world.

American Indian human remains and cultural items have been taken from Indian people ever since the founding of the English colonies in North America, and the practice continued on through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the 1840s, for example, Dr. Samuel Morton, an American physician, tried to prove through skull measurements that the American Indian was racially inferior to non-Indian U.S. citizens and was therefore doomed to die out as a culture. The skulls Morton needed for his comparative cranial library were American Indian skulls gathered by Indian agents, physicians, grave robbers, and military personnel. These people took the skulls from old and recent graves of tribes defeated in battles. Sometimes they even took Indian remains from the battlefields almost immediately after the fighting had ended. Additionally, in 1868, the surgeon general of the U.S. Army ordered army personnel to collect Indian crania and other body parts for the Army Medical Museum to be used for comparative material and for scientific study. 

Some authors have written to try to help the general population gain a better understanding of the situation during that time, but Stephen Redman’s Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums (2016) and Chip Colwell’s Plundered Skulls andStolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America’s Culture (2017), are two good books that offer insights into the situation as it existed in America over the course of the last century-and-a-half.

Not everyone in the United States believes that museums and similar places should keep and study skeletons and other types of artifacts. Many American Indian tribes, families, and individuals want museums to give human skeletal remains and special cultural objects back to the people to whom they once belonged so that tribes can ceremoniously rebury the human remains or reintroduce the sacred objects as part of their traditional religious practices.

In 1989 and 1990, Congress enacted laws that required museums that receive any federal money to identify skeletons, bones, funerary items, and sacred objects within their collections that once belonged to American Indians. The laws also required museums to return the items to the tribes if the tribes could prove that the objects belonged to them and if the tribes wanted them back. But scientists and other people who work with and study these special items complained that, if the items are returned, science could lose valuable information about how humans have adapted throughout history.

In 1989 and ’90, Congress passed two laws––the National Museum of the American Indian Act and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act––that required museums to return sacred items to American Indians. Shown here is Eugene C. Ryan, a chief of the Cheyenne River Sioux, who is being presented with a Ghost Dance shirt that had been on display at the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow, Scotland.

Source: Associated Press.

The process of returning human remains and other special classes of cultural objects has gone on for nearly thirty years. It has not been totally smooth in its operation, and many scientists and American Indian groups resist working with each other. Not as many cultural objects and sets of human remains have been returned as many tribes have expected. Still, the return process has begun.

But human remains and important cultural objects are not the only concerns that American Indians have in relation to their right to continue to practice their traditional culture. As a result of the various treaties signed by the tribes, they were often forced to move away from areas where they had lived before the Europeans arrived. After they moved, American Indians learned where game could be found in their new homelands, which plants would grow best in the new soils and climates, and how to adapt their lifestyles to the changing seasons. They were not, however, able to visit the sacred sites they needed for the free practice of their religion without hardship or risk.

The First Amendment of the Constitution guarantees all American citizens the right to the free practice of their religion. American Indians, however, have had to fight for that right as much as (if not more) than any other ethnic group in the United States.

At one time, the practice of Native religious ceremonies, such as the Sun Dance, was outlawed, and anyone participating in such rites could be put in jail. Things have changed in that respect, but there is another aspect of traditional religion that continues to be a concern among tribal participants.

Certain landscapes or places are an important part of many traditional Indian religions and have been used for generations. Tribal members go to these places to communicate with a higher spirit. Particular sites on the landscape may be considered sacred to members of a tribe because of their connection to tribal stories or histories.

Many of these places, however, are located in areas where the tribe originally lived but are no longer easily accessible to all tribal members. Some places are now part of what is considered to be private property. Additionally, because some of these sacred sites exist within distinctive formations or landscapes, many are now inside state or federal parks.

American Indians have argued that not allowing tribal members to visit these special sites is the same as not allowing a Christian to visit a church, a Jewish person to visit a temple, or a Muslim to visit a mosque. Although there have been attempts by the federal government to address the issue of access to sacred sites, many traditional tribal leaders feel more should be done.

Entry Author: Watkins, Joe Edward.

Repatriation

We resist the categorization of our ancestors' remains as archaeological populations, because it negates our ability and right to define or ascribe our own peoples based upon our own history, customs and values.… They are simply our ancestors, and they, too, deserve the self-evident human right to rest in peace, no matter where they lived, when they lived or died, or their questionable value to science.¹

—Tex G. Hall, chairman, Three Affiliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation

You may have seen some of the older Western movies, where cowboys are fighting a group of Indians, and someone says, The only good Indian is a dead Indian. Well, that was the attitude of whites throughout much of the 1800s, when the pioneers were crossing the Great Plains on their way to Washington, Oregon, and California. American Indians who lived in the Great Plains area and who fought to protect their land were seen as an obstacle to the United States' westward growth and as people who stood in the way of progress.

U.S. government programs aimed at helping the westward expansion across the continent stood in direct conflict with programs that were meant to keep the Indians separated from the American public. Treaties with Indians were meant to limit not only the movements of the tribes but