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Wow! Knockout reporting!
Museums should know better by now.
And they do.
They just can’t let go.
Pathetic.
Other than the fact that these museums/institutions want to keep what they have (for whatever reason), I don’t see the point in not giving it back. Give it back, toss off a “bygones”, and that’s that.
A: Because they know what they have, and the scope of the stolen items (in the 10s of thousands), and because denying/ignoring is less costly than acknowledging and making restitution.
They–and a lot of other Settler institutions–are terrified of #reparations. As they should be.
a process it said would take five years. The “re-inventory” would entail photographing and CT scanning human remains to collect data for future studies, which the tribes opposed.
I am not sure on what the objection is. Unless it is a smoke screen for doing nothing. I was also wondering if DNA samples would be worthy of retention as well. I say that admittedly from a perspective that may not be aware of the overall issues and impact.
in the 1870s, the Smithsonian Institution struck a deal with U.S. Army Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman to pay each of his soldiers up to $500 — or roughly $14,000 in 2022 dollars — for items such as clothing, weapons and everyday tools sent back to Washington
Might as well have told the soldiers there is gold in the hills for the taking. I am sure the cataloging and descriptions of each find were well documented as well.
And in a lot of cases, these are remains and artifacts literally just sitting in drawers or storage. But categorizing, properly identifying, and transporting them for repatriation all take money, which is something museums tend to be tight on even when they want to comply.
Notice how Marc Levine, at the Sam Noble, is doing all of this work… that isn’t his job. It’s nobody’s job, probably because the University doesn’t think it has the money to let the Museum hire someone for that job.
Bet your ass they’d find that money if the Feds decided to tie compliance to being allowed to participate in NCAA activities. A Division I school like that? Oh yeah.
And I’m sympathetic to the AMNH’s position of ‘we can’t tell who to repatriate to’, but that just means you get the tribes in question to get together and jointly accept custody. Let them figure out the disposition of their ancestors.
But at least we’re not the goddamned British Museum, you know? Greece would really like the stolen pieces of the Acropolis back.
The objection on the tribes’ part is basically ‘No, stop fucking with our ancestors’ remains. Stop photographing our dead, stop bombarding their bones with x-rays. Stop disturbing their goddamned rest, you savages, and give them back.’
As for retaining DNA samples… same issue as the larger remains: the living relatives don’t want people doing that shit with their family’s dead. They want these museums to stop treating their extended family members like things and start treating them like people, and that means consent… which they do not give.
“The godamned British Museum”
Cool…we share a hate.
In the running for ‘biggest thieves in the world’:
The British Museum
British Petroleum.
The English Language (ok, kidding on this one, but you see the trend, right?)
That’s for shit sure. And at least–as we’re currently witnessing–we’re on the right side of the historical “should we or should we not have a hereditary monarchy?” debate.
Spot on. Settler culture has been doing this shit for five hundred fucking years, and we’re still doing it.
Sure do. Empires–whether of the monarchical or corporate version–suck.
This was a tourist trap until 1986 when it was discovered that some of the bodies were interred wearing jeans with copper buttons and rivets, IOW parts of the cemetery weren’t exactly ancient.
I bought one of the postcards sold at the site for a friend back in the 90’s and did a lot of research on the site at the libraries before the internet was readily available. Interestingly, in a quick search I found no mention of the recently buried bodies.
Upfront presentation, I have no sentiment for the remains of my family and ancestors if it comes to building useful information. On the other hand, get the work done, be sensitive and put them back where they belong. Warehousing remains for generations makes little sense. And considering how poorly many of those remains were gathered and inventoried originally, their usefulness seems suspect. In fact making the effort to identify and return the remains to their proper groups would build quite a data set in its own right.
I see an opportunity for all interests to take a proactive stance, build a unified mechanism for doing this. That includes the tribes, the government and the institutions together. Too much of this is approached at the individual institution level to begin with.
Speaking of pilfered human remains, someone needs to get Geronimo’s skull back from The Skull and Bones society at Yale.
What incredibly biased, anti-scientific reporting. This issue is clouded by Indian religious creationism, and by people making claims on valuable artifacts who have no demonstrable ancestral connection to said artifacts.
The real problem is the loss to science of ancient DNA with no meaningful connection to any contemporary individuals—Kennewick Man being the most prominent example. If anything, repatriation should require more rigorous testing of claimants’ petitions—not less rigorous.
Religious creationism should never be the basis of any governmental policy-making.
I generally don’t either, but that’s a personal decision, and I do respect the right of other people who have religious beliefs to oppose disturbing graves because of those beliefs. I mean, nothing that native tribes believe is as wacky as the idea that disturbing graves will mean that when God judges all of humanity, virtuous souls won’t be able to get into heaven because they can’t find their bones. Which… you know, is a historical tenet of a fair chunk of Christianity.
In most native tribal situations, it’s mostly an issue of ‘show some goddamned respect and stop treating the bodies like they weren’t people’. Go to your average church, mosque, or synagogue in the US and suggest it’d be ok to treat their dead like museums have treated tribal dead. Even progressive churches, mosques, and synagogues. See how well it goes.
Yeah, government shouldn’t need your consent to go doing whatever it wants to you, your ancestors, and your sacred places! Fuck ‘consent of the governed’!
Edit: Don’t get me wrong, I am as pro-science as you can get. But I’m also pro-human-rights. Setting the precedent that the government—or worse, a private institution—gets to be a unilateral arbiter of ‘this human is now an object, and can be privately owned’? No. Just no. It’s bad precedent.
And it’s not scientifically-useful. The remains we’re talking about were obtained and collected in ways that generally reduced their scientific usefulness. The very difficulty in categorizing them demonstrates that. Worse, the collection and retention of these bodies against the wishes of the native tribes just makes those tribes more resistant to cooperating in the future, and more likely to bring lawsuits against scientific institutions that will cost them funding and reduce their ability to conduct good science in the future.
When it comes to scientific sampling… always take the long view, because our instruments for analysis in the future will be much better than what we have now. So doing things now that make people less likely to be helpful then is just shooting yourself in the foot.
Maybe some tribes need to dig up some cemeteries and hold onto some White men’s carcasses for a while.
The people crying about this issue are anti-science now and will be anti-science in the future, because they are religious fundamentalists/creationists, and/or rent-seekers.
If you can’t prove a close familial connection to human remains, you should not have a right to determine their allocation. But the situation now is that claimants are more often than not given the benefit of the doubt in order to be politically correct.
Right on! If only the tribes would start scientifically studying the remains of dead White guys! Dig up some cemeteries, poke the bodies. Scrape their bones.
To whom? That is the frequently sticky question. Institutions have certainly taken advantage of the many historical ambiguities, but they do exist. It’s especially tricky with truly ancient remains… NAGPRA really didn’t think these questions through all that well. And those issues were already fairly clear by the time I studied it in law school.
Ok, so how many of these museums can prove they have a close familial connection to those human remains?
By your own metric, if they can’t, then they don’t have a right to determine that those remains should have been removed from where they were found.
In most cases, the people ‘crying’ about this issue aren’t anti-science. They’re just tired of getting shat on, shot at, infected, displaced, dispossessed, lied to, having their kids stolen and put into schools where they’re forced to adopt the oppressors’ culture and denied contact with their own, having supposedly inviolate treaties repeatedly violated, having the places that are important to their cultures dug up, burned down, blown up to celebrate the white man’s superiority…
They’re tired of centuries of abuse, rape, murder, theft… it’s not about religious fundamentalism, it’s about showing some basic goddamned respect for other human beings.