Is NAGPRA Emptying Museums?
Native American Tribes Reclaim Museum Collections
A recent article argued that Native American tribes are reclaiming a large percentage of museum collections in the US. Is NAGPRA really emptying U.S. museums out?
A recent article in the Washington Post, entitled, "Museum Collections Shrink As Tribes Reclaim Artifacts" paints a portrait of Native American tribes reclaiming large portions of museum collections under the guidelines of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act or NAGPRA. While the article is correct in stating that thousands of objects have been returned to American Indian and Native Hawaiian tribes within the borders in the U.S., the article might lead one to believe that the storage areas in museums across the country are quickly being emptied.
The article states that, "The halls of the United States' museums, like those inside the public history museum here, are filled with thousands -- if not millions -- of American Indian artifacts." And later, "All told, museums have returned hundreds of thousands of items through the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act." Reading these two statements would lead an uninformed reader to believe that a large percentage of museum owned artifacts are being returned to Native American tribes, which is simply not the case.
According to the last official NAGPRA report, published in September 2005, the guidelines of the law have allowed 633,525 funerary objects (or objects that were discovered in a graves) and 31,571 sets of ancestral remains to return home. To put this situation in context, some of the major museums in the United States have literally millions of catalogue numbers intended to document Native American material culture. If you divide up the number of repatriated items and remains between all of the federally funded museums in the country that hold American Indian objects, this reflects a small percentage of material that has actually left museum hands.
NAGPRA was passed by Congress in 1990 in order to return objects and human remains which mainstream American society now sees as inappropriate for museum collections. We now see many of the intellectual rationalizations for collecting sacred objects or human remains as being at best grossly insensitive and at worst racist and immoral.
The opinions of Native Americans regarding museum collections is as diverse as the peoples themselves, many tribal peoples believe that the display of certain objects representing their cultural heritage, which can be found at museums spread across the country, provides a valuable service to their culture by teaching the diverse American public who they are. On the other hand, some individuals would like to see all of the material culture representing their tribes in their own cultural heritage centers.
As is usually the case, compromise and understanding is clearly the most rational path forward. Museums today must recognize that some of the objects in their collection were brought to them under what we now consider immoral or insensitive pretences, and tribal peoples must attempt to understand that the display of some of their art and material culture that was brought to the museum in an ethical fashion can help educate the American public about who they are - and where they came from.
