What's up with the Hearst?

While the Smithsonian repatriates cultural patrimony and sacred objects to the
Yurok, what is the story with the Hearst?

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The Smithsonian Institution has returned a trove of precious artifacts to the Yurok Indians in California in what is one of the largest repatriations of Native American ceremonial artifacts in U.S. history.

The Yurok, who have lived for centuries along California's Klamath River, received 217 sacred items that had been stored on museum shelves for nearly 100 years. The necklaces, headdresses, arrows, hides and other regalia from the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian are believed to be hundreds, if not thousands, of years old.

"It's awesome. It's a big thing with our people," said Thomas O'Rourke, chairman of the Yurok, a tribe that lived next to the Klamath River in far Northern California for 10,000 years before Europeans arrived. "These are our prayer items. They are not only symbols, but their spirit stays with them. They are alive. Bringing them home is like bringing home prisoners of war."

To celebrate the return of the items, the Yurok will hold a Kwom-Shlen-ik, or "Object Coming Back," ceremony today in the town of Klamath.

The returned artifacts were sold to the museum in the 1920s by Grace Nicholson, a renowned collector of Indian art, who owned a curio shop in Pasadena in the early 20th century. Ceremonial Indian regalia was in vogue among wealthy Americans at the time.

The sacred cache is part of an ongoing effort around the country to return Native American burial artifacts, ceremonial items and remains taken by white settlers from Indian villages and indigenous sites.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=%2Fc%2Fa%2F2010%2F08%2F13%2FMN0O1ET3EI.DTL&tsp=1#ixzz0wXSeX1yY

Oops, forget something? (Part 2)

You really have to give it to the Hearst and their clunky on-line museum catalog.
Once again, while they seem to be in a hurry and get a less than perfect search engine out there, they seem to have forgotten their NAGPRA obligations.

Take for example, catalog numbers of human remains from the Cardinal Site (SJo-154):

12-11273 through 12-11307

http://pahma.berkeley.edu/delphi/modules/browser/details.php?onum=12-11299

Once again, search the National NAGPRA database at the NPS. Take a guess what is missing from the culturally unidentified database...

Like we said before 43 CFR 10.11 can only work when the museums come clean on
what they are holding.

(PS--why do some people at the university also insist the Hearst has not taken in human remains since the 1970s when these were accessioned in the mid-1980s?)

Oops, forget something? (Part 1)

The clunky new search engine at the museum's website can be quite handy at times.

For example, look up 2-13845. Here is the link to what you will find:

http://pahma.berkeley.edu/delphi/modules/browser/details.php?onum=2-13845

Interesting to note, this has still yet to be registered with the National NAGPRA
database. I guess they assume scalps were freely taken...

40 CFR 10.11 can only work if the museums are honest in the first place!

UM news (again)

Returning Them To Their Tribe - Michigan Museums Returning Native American Remains Charles Manley

The University of Michigan's Museum of Anthropology has a collection of around 1,400 ancient Native American remains. But they'll lose those remains under a new federal law - and the ability to conduct research with them.

The room that stores the remains of about 1,400 Native Americans is on the ground floor of a non-descript building on campus, but it looks more like a basement. Rows of industrial shelving hold 24-inch long white cardboard boxes - lengthy enough to accommodate the longest human bone - a femur. Each box has a label of a human skeleton on its side, indicated by highlighter which bones the box contains.

Carla Sinopoli is the curator of the Museum of Anthropology. She says early archaeologists had basic questions - 'how old is it?' 'how did they get their food?'. But now they ask all kinds of questions.

"How societies are formed, how beliefs are structured, how communities communicate and move," says Sinopoli, "Political questions, social questions, idealogical questions, economic questions...and the more we know the sophisticated our questions become too."

Even DNA research of human remains is relatively new. Sinopoli says there's no telling what could be learned in twenty or thirty years. But that room and all the white boxes could soon be empty.

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, was created twenty years ago. The first version required all federally funded museums to take inventories of skeletal remains and try to figure out what Native American groups they belonged to. Many remains were returned to their tribes of origin, but researchers still had something to work with. The remains that couldn't be linked to tribes were left in museums.

But the law that went into effect last month requires that those remains be returned to tribes too. Sinopoli says the loss will be a permanent one.

http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/michigan/news.newsmain/article/8/0/1658808/Arts..and..Culture/Returning.Them.To.Their.Tribe.-.Michigan.Museums.Returning.Native.American.Remains.

The Rights of the Dead

On May 29th, she will defend her PhD thesis Duties to Past Persons: Moral Standing and Posthumous Interests of Old Human Remains at the Uppsala University in Sweden. Masterton's thesis covers the moral status of past people and our duties towards the dead.

“At least in Sweden, the living are protected by laws on genetic integrity. We have no legal obligations to King Tut or other historical persons, but there is perhaps still integrity worth protecting,” says Malin Masterton at the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics (CRB).

In her thesis, Malin Masterton discusses ethical guidelines for the handling of human remains and makes suggestions for revisions. The basis for these revisions is that the dead also have an identity in the form of a narrative. “I propose that the dead should be given moral status based on our respect for human life,” says Malin Masterton.

Whose integrity and interest is it when the person is dead? Malin Masterton argues that parts of a person’s identity remain after death. One way of looking at identity is as a narrative – the story of one’s life – that both stands alone and is interwoven with other people’s stories. Seen like this, the dead too have a name and a reputation worth protecting. So no more calling Helen of Troy a whore, Nero a nitwit or Belzoni a looting circus artist?

If the dead, to some degree like the living, have integrity and reputation, they also have moral status and we can wrong them. According to Malin Masterton, we have three duties to the dead:

• We have a duty of truthfulness in our description of a person’s reputation.
• We have a duty to respect the personal integrity of the dead in research contexts.
• We have a duty to admit wrongs we have committed against the dead, like illegal archaeological digs.

rest at

http://heritage-key.com/blogs/ann/do-no-harm-dead-urges-new-thesis-ethics-human-remains

Sherry Hutt responds on 43 CFR 10.11

Archaeologists and anthropologists are concerned that a new rule implementing the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, covering human remains and cultural objects that can't be culturally affiliated with a particular tribe. They have written the Department of Interior asking that the rule be changed. Sherry Hutt, program manager for the National NAGPRA Program with the National Park Service, responded to some of the scientific concerns in an e-mail to ScienceInsider, suggesting that the remains covered by the rule aren't likely to have much scientific value:

Note that this rule applies only to human remains already determined to be Native American, but for whom the body of knowledge is insufficient to determine, even to the level of a reasonable basis, the cultural affiliation of the individuals.

rest at

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/05/official-responds-to-scientists-.html

Michigan readies to enact 43 CFR 10.11

Well, UM appears to be getting ready to do the right thing--what about the Hearst Museum? If UM is hiring 2 people for 1600 remains, why isn't the Hearst/UCB hiring 10 or more people? Or will they hide behind the excuse of furloughs and budget cuts? or are they too worried about an athletic center and a stadium retrofit?

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The University of Michigan is hiring two new staff members to help return Native American remains and objects from its museum collection to tribes that can show a geographical link to them under a federal law that took effect earlier this month.

Stephen Forrest, U-M’s vice president for research, said he anticipates Native American tribes will file claims for the return of the bones of virtually all of the 1,600 individuals in the collection of the U-M Museum of Anthropology. That collection is not open to the public.

“The university right now is doing everything right,” said Veronica Pasfield, a U-M graduate student who is the external co-chair of the Native Caucus, a group of indigenous graduate students, and the repatriation officer of the Bay Mills Indian Community. "I think that they are working with transparency, they're working very hard to attain full disclosure, and I believe they are sincerely focused on creating empowered tribal collaboration."

rest at

http://www.annarbor.com/news/university-of-michigan-begins-process-to-return-native-american-remains/

Scientists appeal to Salazar

Leading lights of anthropology have submitted a plea to the Department of the Interior to change a rule concerning how museums and universities are to dispose of "culturally unaffiliated remains"—ancient bones and objects that cannot be linked to a particular tribe or group. Under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) passed in 1990, remains culturally affiliated with certain tribes must be returned to those tribes, who may then rebury them. But the new rule goes further in requiring unaffiliated remains to be given to organizations whose tribal lands are nearby if they request it, or even to be given to other groups.

In a 17 May letter of protest to Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, researchers say that the rule as written will cause "an incalculable loss to science" by permanently making such remains unavailable, and that the rule is "contrary to both the letter and the spirit of the law." The letter is signed by a who's who of 41 prominent archeaologists and anthropologists, all members of the National Academy of Sciences.

rest at

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/05/researchers-fear-incalculable-lo.html

(We hope the tribes are also making their appeal for Secretary Salazar to ignore the scientists!)

A museum curator who likes the new NAGPRA rules

Opening America's skeleton closets

By Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh

Posted: 05/09/2010 01:00:00 AM MDT

More than 116,000 skeletons of Native American ancestry sit idle on museum shelves today. Their fate — long unknown — has finally been settled.

On Friday, a new regulation will establish a process to return Native American human remains that have not been affiliated with a federally recognized tribe. This legal rule fulfills the promise of the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which already has laid the groundwork for the return of 32,000 Native American skeletons. The new rule affects hundreds of museums and tribes across the United States.

The panic has already set in. As the journal Nature recently reported, "researchers fear that this could empty museum collections." An Indian Country Today article suggests that scientists may sue to challenge the rule.

Resistance to repatriation is based on the false assumption that human bones are merely scientific "specimens." But the tangible vestiges of a human life have a distinctive power. From Buddhist cremations to Christian burials, cultures around the globe acknowledge the body's spiritual vitality, even in death. For centuries, Western common law has affirmed that human skeletons are not "property" that can be taken without consent.

Yet, these views have not been fairly extended to Native Americans over the last 500 years. American Indian graves have been systematically pillaged since the first colonial encounters. In addition to scientific expeditions, many Native American skeletons come from massacre sites and outright plunder.

rest at

http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_15034481

Kashia Pomo lose fishing grounds

On an ocean bluff above a resting seal and relentless waves, Kashia Pomo leaders Friday voiced opposition to new state rules that prohibit harvesting fish and other sea life at Stewarts Point.

More Photos:

• Kashia Pomo Blessing

The rules, which take effect today, establish a series of state preserves intended to help restore California's marine ecosystems.

But to the Indians with ties to Stewarts Point, the fishing ban there harms their culture, their ceremonies and the transmission of traditions to future generations.

“Today I'm going to tell you they are interfering with our religion,” Violet Parrish Chappell, a Kashia Pomo elder, told Indians and supporters who came together just up the road from the Stewarts Point Store. “And I don't think they would do that to the Catholic Church.”

About 130 people stood Friday in bright sun and constant wind on a ranch owned by the Richardson family, which settled the area 130 years ago and controls about 15,000 acres.

Arch Richardson, an elder among the family's 85 descendants, invited leaders from the Stewarts Point Rancheria to bless the bluff and to mark the last day when fishing was permitted there. About a half-dozen tribal members harvested abalone in the nearby surf earlier in the day.

rest at

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20100430/ARTICLES/100439928&tc=email_newsletter?p=all&tc=pgall&tc=ar