ProPublica Updates Its Database of Museums’ and Universities’ Compliance With Federal Repatriation Law

 

The Arizona State Museum in Tucson is among the institutions that have gone through their collections to determine what belonged to the federal government. Credit: Michael Barera/Wikimedia

ProPublica Updates Its Database of Museums’ and Universities’ Compliance With Federal Repatriation Law

by Mary Hudetz

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Series: The Repatriation Project:The Delayed Return of Native Remains

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Museums, universities and government agencies continued to make headway last year toward repatriating the remains of thousands of Native American ancestors to tribal nations after decades of slow progress drew national attention.

Nowhere was the shift more apparent than at the U.S. Department of the Interior, the agency charged with enforcing the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which requires items and remains taken from Indigenous gravesites to be returned to tribes.

The department’s subagencies, including the National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management, collectively repatriated the remains of 1,366 Native American ancestors last year, more than a third of the number in its possession at the start of the year. The department’s efforts reflected an awareness, documented in an internal memo in late 2023, that it has a crucial leadership role to play under NAGPRA. Only the Illinois State Museum, an institution that ProPublica has reported on in-depth, came close to repatriating as many, with the transfer of more than 1,320 remains excavated from a single site.

The emphasis on repatriation increased in tandem with reporting by ProPublica in 2023 about failures to comply with the law.

“For too long ancestors and Tribal cultural items have been disconnected from their communities and resting on museum shelves,” Interior officials said in an October 2023 memo.

In response to questions from ProPublica, an Interior spokesperson did not say whether the department’s focus on repatriation will continue under Donald Trump’s second presidency but pointed to new regulations finalized in 2023 that aimed to speed up the process. The regulations, which took effect last year, require institutions to defer more to tribal accounts of their histories and ties to the regions from which remains were removed; the rules also set new deadlines for institutions to comply with the law.

In total, museums, universities and agencies across the country returned more than 10,300 Native American ancestors to tribes last year. The total makes 2024 the third-biggest year for the repatriation of ancestral remains under NAGPRA, according to an online ProPublica database that allows the public to look up the records of more than 600 museums and universities that must comply with the law. Today, ProPublica is updating the database to show repatriation progress through Jan. 6, 2025.

Outside of the Interior Department and the Illinois State Museum, state universities also recorded significant progress. For example, California State University, Sacramento repatriated the remains of 873 Native Americans previously held in its collection.

The progress made last year followed a record number of repatriations in 2023, when institutions returned 18,000 Native American ancestors.

“The progress shows the regulations are working,” said Shannon O’Loughlin, the chief executive for the Association on American Indian Affairs, a nonprofit that advocates for Native American rights.

Nearly 60% of ancestral remains reported as falling under NAGPRA over the years have now been repatriated, but that still leaves at least 90,000 that must be returned to tribes. The Interior Department has acknowledged that many of the human remains it must eventually repatriate have long been unaccounted for in federal inventories. Many of the department’s collections are scattered across the country in university and museum repositories over which the federal government has no oversight, officials said.

Agency staffers also said last year that they would need continued funding for their efforts — a factor that may prove challenging under an administration focused on cutting spending and staffing.

“We need to sustain this work until all of the ancestors that are in DOI control have been repatriated,” one Interior Department employee last year told the National NAGPRA Review Committee, a federal advisory board made up of museum, science and tribal representatives.

More Work to do at the Interior Department

Just over a year ago, the Interior Department had yet to repatriate more than 3,000 ancestors, many of which were excavated in 20th century archaeological digs and infrastructure projects on federal and tribal lands.

The department’s progress repatriating 1,366 Native American ancestors last year comes after top officials sent directives in late 2023 instructing Interior agencies to prioritize the work. Some agencies also set aside more money for repatriation work.

“If you look at previous budgets, we weren’t allocated any funding for NAGPRA,” Tamara Billie, the chief of cultural resource management for the Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs, told the National NAGPRA Review Committee last May.

She estimated it could cost several million dollars over the next three to five years for the bureau to repatriate the hundreds of ancestors it has yet to reunite with tribes.

Since Congress passed NAGPRA in 1990, federal staffers have tried to locate the collections excavated on federal and tribal lands, but they have often found that museums and universities transferred their holdings to other institutions without leaving much of a paper trail.

Last year, officials said only a handful of repositories, like the Arizona State Museum in Tucson, had gone through their collections to determine what belonged to the federal government — an early step in the often long repatriation process.

“Some have submitted very detailed, in some cases itemized inventory information,” said Bridget Ambler, with the Bureau of Land Management, during a National NAGPRA Review Committee hearing last year. “But to be honest, for the vast majority we’re not fully aware of what the nature of those collections are and if they include human remains or NAGPRA cultural items.”

Under the new NAGPRA regulations, museums and universities had a deadline of January of this year to hand in lists of items in their facilities that should be included in federal inventories. The requirement resulted in museums and universities submitting roughly 1,000 new notices to the Interior Department, the manager of the National NAGPRA Program said during a recorded training last month. It’s not clear how many ancestral remains are accounted for in those notices.

Progress in Illinois and Ohio

At the Illinois State Museum, which holds the second-largest collection of Native American remains, leadership was already focused on improving their repatriation record. Then, a new state law, along with the Interior Department’s updated regulations, went into effect. The state law, which followed ProPublica’s reporting, gave tribes more control over reburials. It also established a fund for repatriation work, such as paying for tribal members to travel to the museum to consult on collections, and for the reburials of remains.

Many of the remains held by the state museum came from a burial mound dug up in the 1920s by Don Dickson, a chiropractor. He turned the burial site into a roadside attraction. Over the years, Native Americans, whose tribes had been forcibly removed to other states, protested the exhibit that later became the Dickson Mounds Museum, a branch of the Illinois State Museum.

The state eventually closed the burial mounds exhibit, but the museum kept the human remains, maintaining that they could not be traced to living people and therefore would not be repatriated. That was until this past year.

On Feb. 24, 2024, the Illinois State Museum published a notice in the Federal Register saying that 1,325 ancestors and thousands of items buried with them were available to tribes for repatriation. As of the start of this year, the Illinois State Museum held the remains of an estimated 5,800 Native American ancestors.

Only the Ohio History Connection now holds more unrepatriated human remains, over 7,900 in total, according to federal data. In the roughly three decades prior to 2024, the Columbus institution had returned fewer than 20 ancestors to tribes. But it showed signs of progress last year in making more than 150 ancestral remains, or roughly 2% of its skeletal collection reported under NAGPRA, available to be repatriated. In an email, a spokesperson for the museum said it expects to complete more repatriations in consultation with tribal partners, who have asked the museum “not to rush this critical work.”

As in Illinois, the Ohio institution’s collections largely originate from centuries-old burial mounds in a state where tribal nations were forcibly removed.

“It Is Time for the State to Take Repatriation Seriously”

More state support for repatriation also could be on the horizon in Arizona. Last month, Gov. Katie Hobbs announced she would ask lawmakers for $7 million to support repatriation efforts at the Arizona State Museum.

The museum on the University of Arizona campus in Tucson is a repository for the state and federal government. Over the years, records show, it has conducted repatriations but has yet to return more than half of its collection reported under NAGPRA — the remains of 2,600 ancestors total — to tribes mostly in the Southwest.

“The hard-working staff at the museum have done their best to repatriate human remains and artifacts to tribes without any significant financial investment from the state,” Hobbs, a Democrat, said in prepared remarks to tribal leaders last month. “It is time for that to change. It is time for the state to take repatriation seriously.”

One of the museums’ challenges in trying to reach full compliance with the law stems from the fact that it continues to receive human remains because of its status as a state repository. Arizona medical examiners have sent the museum human remains that they come across in their investigations, including the ancestors of Native Americans. In some instances, looters have surrendered items and bones unearthed from graves, according to Jim Watson, associate director at the Arizona State Museum. (Looting violates federal laws.)

“We will receive an individual or remains in the mail or objects from private citizens, particularly when individuals pass away and their relatives are going through their stuff,” he told the NAGPRA Review Committee last spring. “They find a box in the garage or the attic, for example, and it says, ‘from Arizona,’ ‘artifacts from Arizona,’ ‘artifacts from Phoenix’ or ‘ancestral remains.’ So, they will ship them to the University of Arizona, often without contacting us first.”

He estimates the museum receives such packages two to three times per year.

Ash Ngu contributed data analysis.

Does Your Local Museum or University Still Have Native American Remains? 

SOURCE: 

https://www.propublica.org/article/native-american-remains-returned-repatriation-nagpra

‘I see our last names’: Oneida Families Bury Children taken to Carlisle

 Indian Boarding Schools| URL

Pallbearers carry the casket of one of the children returned from the cemetery at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania up the stairs to the Church of the Holy Apostles in Hobart, Wisconsin. Photo by Andrew Kennard

By Andrew Kennard | July 11, 2022

“I feel like traveling home,” the Oneida singers sang, their voices filling the Church of the Holy Apostles in Hobart, Wisconsin. “My heavenly home is right ahead, I feel like traveling home.”

After a memorial service on June 27, the families of Paul Wheelock and Frank Green buried the remains of the two Oneida children in the church’s cemetery. Over 120 years ago, Wheelock and Green were buried at Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.

“Well, he always wanted to come home,” said Mary Jane Doxtator, Green’s niece. “He ran away [from the boarding school] about four or five times, maybe more.”

Pallbearers approach the grave sites of Frank Green and Paul Wheelock. Drummers and singers watch from close to the treeline. | Photo by Andrew Kennard

After a memorial service, the congregation gathered by two open graves. Drumming and singing rang out from a group of mourners standing deeper in the cemetery. After the caskets were lowered into the ground, mourners came forward with offerings of tobacco or earth for the graves. 

“…I just wondered why I wasn’t told about him,” Doxtator said.

Carlisle was the first of a system of at least 408 government-run schools that abused and aimed to eliminate the languages and cultures of Native American students, who often lived in inhumane conditions. Carlisle’s founder, Richard Henry Pratt, advocated the idea that the U.S. should “kill the Indian in him, and save the man” in an 1892 speech.

An Interior department report released in May estimates that the “approximate number of Indian children who died at Federal Indian boarding schools to be in the thousands or tens of thousands,” and that many were buried in unmarked or poorly maintained graves far away from their communities and families. A bill introduced in Congress later that month aims to create a Truth and Healing Commission that would investigate the impacts and ongoing effects of the boarding school system.

“And when I think about these children, we all know the stories of the boarding schools,” Oneida councilman Kirby Metoxen said to the mourners assembled in Hobart, speaking on behalf of one of the families. “And I just can’t imagine being taken so far away from home and getting sick and knowing that you’re getting ready to go to that other side alone.” 

‘I see our last names’

Frank Green and Paul Wheelock were laid to rest in the church’s cemetery, near the graves of Ophelia Powless, David Doxtater and Jeffrey Parker.Wheelock and Green were buried next to Ophelia Powless, whose remains were reclaimed from Carlisle in 2019 along with the remains of two other teenage Oneida students. 

“We still have two up there,” Metoxen said. “Jemima John and Melissa Metoxen are still out there, and those families still have to decide what they want to do with the remains of those children.”

In a statement on Thursday, the Office of Army Cemeteries said that it has finalized its fifth disinterment project in returning seven Native American or Alaska Native children to their families, and that many have already been buried on their native lands. When an eighth grave was disinterred, the Army found remains that did not match the child that records said had been buried there.

“The combined Army team was privileged to support families and return seven more children this summer, totaling 28 over the past six years,” Renea Yates, director of the Office of Army Cemeteries, said in the statement. “We are committed to caring for the graves of children who remain buried at the Carlisle Barracks Post Cemetery and will continue to support the disinterment of those requested to be returned.”

Over ten thousand children from about 50 tribes across the nation attended Carlisle, according to the Army; about 190 children were buried at the school, according to Dickinson College, which houses the Carlisle Indian School Digital Research Center.

Metoxen said that when he visited Carlisle, he was expecting to see the graves of children from tribes other than his own. 

“And as I’m walking through that cemetery, I see our last names,” Metoxen said. “Coulon. Powless. Green. Wheelock. John. And about the fourth or fifth headstone I came upon was a Melissa Metoxen. And I have a niece, Melissa Metoxen. It stopped me in my tracks. My thought immediately was, how come nobody came to get these kids?”

What happened to Frank Green and Paul Wheelock?

Paul Wheelock was ten months old when he died of a “severe cold,” according to a Carlisle school newspaper. During a brief sermon at the memorial service, the Rev. Rodger Patience said that Paul was the son of Dennison Wheelock, a band leader at Carlisle. Dennison, a former Carlisle student, had graduated from the school about ten years before his infant son’s death in 1900, the Carlisle Digital Research Center found. 

Frank Green was a teenager when he died on June 25, 1898. He was killed by a train while running away from the school a week before he was set to go home, according to documents from the time gathered by the Carlisle Digital Research Center. 

“The letters back from the hired hands at Carlisle only describe him as a juvenile delinquent,” Patience told the mourners. “They don’t describe him as a child who was traumatized. They don’t describe him as a child who was taken from his home by force and made to submit to an institution that he didn’t want to be part of.”

‘Welcoming that spirit back to this place called home’

Mourners watched the caskets sink into the ground. | Photo by Andrew KennardThe Oneida Nation said in 2019 that 109 community members had been identified as descendants of tribal members who passed away while attending Carlisle over 100 years ago. During the memorial service, Metoxen said that his grandparents could speak the Oneida language, but his parents could not. 

“So I heard my grandparents speaking the language, but none of my parents,” Metoxen told the mourners. “In that generation, I didn’t hear the language too much. Because of the boarding school era.”

Carlisle isn’t the only boarding school that Oneida students attended. Doxtator said that her parents and aunt attended the Tomah Indian School, and that students at a boarding school located in Oneida were not allowed to speak their native language. 

The Oneida Nation Pow Wow landed on the same weekend as the memorial service, and the community recognized the two children with an honor song. | Photo by Andrew Kennard“One day, [a relative] was in the dining room and everyone was visiting,” Doxtator said. “And he started speaking Oneida and they made him stand on a chair all during the meal.”

Later, “when they started the Oneida language program to teach Oneida to the Oneidas, he was one of the teachers,” she added.

The day before the memorial service, community members marched around the Oneida Nation’s powwow grounds for an honor song that recognized Green and Wheelock. 

“But today is really a day of celebration,” the powwow’s announcer said before the dance began. “And when we start out this song, this is a song of welcoming that spirit back to this place called home. Our elders always had a story that wherever we travel, we’ll always come home.”

This story originally appeared in the Wisconsin Examiner.