Frank Vaisvilas, Green Bay Press-Gazette
Tue, December 21, 2021, 5:02 AM·3 min read
BELOIT – Researchers at Beloit College are working to repatriate the remains of hundreds of individuals unearthed during archeological excavations at ancient Indigenous burial sites.
Some of the bones had once been used as teaching materials, but scientists have since realized that was an unethical practice.
“We don’t believe it’s ethical for us to continue teaching with human remains because our threshold is consent,” said Nicolette Meister, director of the Logan Museum of Anthropology, a teaching museum at Beloit College.
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Twenty ancient Indigenous burial mounds are located on the college campus. There were originally 25 mounds that date back 1500 years, but some mounds were destroyed during archeological excavation, which ceased during the 1970s when college museum staff and students started working with Indigenous nations in northern Wisconsin.
About 80% of ancient burial mounds in Wisconsin have been lost since the early 1800s due to farming, development, erosion or looting.
Beloit staff and archeologists in the mid-1980s worked and succeeded in convincing state legislators to pass some protection for burial mounds in Wisconsin.
In 1990, Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), administered through the National Park Service, that requires certain Native American remains, funerary objects, sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony be returned to their rightful tribes.
“NAGPRA makes museums accountable and consult with the tribes,” Meister said. “That wasn’t the case in the past when only the museum had the authority. … We recognize the history and legacy of colonialism is inescapable, especially in anthropology museums.”
She said the Logan Museum has a long history of NAGPRA compliance and consulting with tribal neighbors, but it wasn’t until earlier this year that museum received a federal grant to help repatriate the, at least, 400 individual human remains in possession of the museum.
The museum will use the up to $89,000 NAGPRA grant to help identify which tribes the remains belong to.
The college is located on the ancestral land of several cultures, including the Ho-Chunk and Potawatomi, but the museum had collected artifacts from around the world.
The museum was established in 1894 based on a collection and acquisitions of artifacts from the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
It has since grown to curate about 350,000 objects.
Meister said the NAGPRA grant will help to accelerate consultation and eventual repatriation of the human remains to their respective tribes once the work is complete to determine where they should go.
“We’re not just consulting with one group,” she said. “Much of this work is focused on building trust and building relationships. There’s an understanding that our common goal is to repatriate. Everyone is working on return of these ancestors to the earth.”
The museum also has worked to repatriate cultural items in the past, including a headdress to the Hopi Nation in Arizona, a drum to the White Earth Ojibwe Nation in Minnesota and metal artifacts to the Odawa Nation in Michigan.
These artifacts were acquired by the museum around 1900.
“The work of NAGPRA is important human rights legislation,” Meister said. “And the museum is focused on anti-racism, equity and inclusion.”
Frank Vaisvilas is a Report For America corps member based at the Green Bay Press-Gazette covering Native American issues in Wisconsin. He can be reached at 920-228-0437 or fvaisvilas@gannett.com, or on Twitter at @vaisvilas_frank. Please consider supporting journalism that informs our democracy with a tax-deductible gift to this reporting effort at GreenBayPressGazette.com/RFA.
This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Researchers working to return human remains to Indigenous nations
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