by The American Museum of Natural History will close two major rooms displaying Native American artifacts, its leaders said Friday, in a dramatic response to new federal regulations that require museums to obtain consent from tribes before displaying or conducting research on items. cultural.
“The rooms we are closing are artifacts of an era when museums like ours did not respect the values, perspectives and, indeed, shared humanity of indigenous peoples,” Sean Decatur, the museum’s president, wrote in a letter to museum staff on Friday morning. . “Actions that may seem sudden to some may seem long overdue to others.”
The museum will close galleries dedicated to the Eastern Woodlands and Great Plains this weekend, and will cover a number of other display cases featuring Native American cultural items as it reviews its massive collection to make sure it complies with the new rules. federal. which came into effect this month.
Museums across the country have been covering up exhibits as curators struggle to determine whether they can be displayed under the new regulations. The Field Museum in Chicago covered some display cases, the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology at Harvard University said it would remove all funerary belongings from the exhibition, and the Cleveland Museum of Art covered some display cases. And the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York said late Friday that it had removed about 20 items from its musical instrument galleries.
But the action by the American Museum of Natural History in New York, which attracts 4.5 million visitors a year, making it one of the most visited museums in the world, sends a powerful message to the field. The museum’s anthropology department is one of the oldest and most prestigious in the United States, known for doing pioneering work under a long line of curators, including Franz Boas and Margaret Mead. The closures will leave nearly 10,000 square feet of exhibit space off-limits to visitors; The museum said it could not provide an exact timeline for when the reconsidered exhibits would reopen.
“Some objects may never be displayed again as a result of the consultation process,” Decatur said in an interview. “But we’re looking to create smaller-scale programs throughout the museum that can explain what kind of process is going on.”
The changes are the result of a concerted effort by the Biden administration to expedite the repatriation of Native American remains, funerary objects and other sacred objects. The process began in 1990 with the approval of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, which established protocols for museums and other institutions to return human remains, funerary objects and other property to tribes. But as those efforts have gone on for decades, tribal representatives criticized the law as too slow and too susceptible to institutional resistance.
This month, new federal regulations Provisions designed to expedite returns went into effect, giving institutions five years to prepare all human remains and related funerary objects for repatriation and giving more authority to tribes throughout the process.
“We’re finally being heard, and it’s not a fight, it’s a conversation,” said Myra Masiel-Zamora, archaeologist and curator of the Pechanga Band of Indians.
Even in the two weeks since the new regulations went into effect, he said, he has felt the tenor of conversations have changed. In the past, institutions often viewed Native oral histories as less persuasive than academic studies in determining which modern tribes to repatriate objects to, she said. But the new regulations require institutions to “defer to traditional Native American knowledge from their direct descendants, Indian tribes, and Native Hawaiian organizations.”
“We can say, ‘This has to come home,’ and I hope there’s no pushback,” Masiel-Zamora said.
Museum leaders have been preparing for the new regulations for months, consulting lawyers and curators and holding long meetings to discuss what might need to be covered up or removed. Many institutions are planning to hire staff to comply with the new rules, which may involve extensive consultation with tribal representatives.
The result has been a major change in practices regarding Native American exhibits at some of the country’s major museums, a change that will be noticeable to visitors.
At the American Museum of Natural History, segments of the collection that were once used to teach students about the Iroquois, Mohegans, Cheyenne, Arapaho and other groups will be temporarily inaccessible. That includes large objects, such as the birch bark canoe of Menominee origin in the Eastern Woods Hall, and smaller ones, including darts dating back to 10,000 BC. C. and a Hopi Katsina doll from what is now Arizona. Student field trips to the Hall of Eastern Woodlands are being rethought now that they will not have access to those galleries.
“What might seem misaligned to some people is due to the notion that museums fix descriptions of the world in amber,” Decatur said. “But museums do best when they reflect changing ideas.”
The display of Native American human remains is generally prohibited in museums, so the collections being reassessed include sacred objects, funerary objects and other cultural heritage items. As the new regulations have been discussed and debated over the past year, some professional organizations, such as the Society for American Archaeology, have expressed concern that the rules were going too far in museums’ collection management practices. But since the regulations went into effect on January 12, there has been little public opposition from museums.
Much of the native human remains and cultural objects were collected through practices now considered outdated and even odious, including donations from grave raiders and archaeological excavations that cleared indigenous cemeteries.
“This is human rights work, and we need to think of it as that and not as science,” said Candace Sall, director of the University of Missouri’s anthropology museum, which is still working to repatriate the remains of more than 2,400 individuals. American natives. Sall said she added five staff members to work on repatriation in anticipation of the regulations and hopes to add more.
Criticism of the pace of repatriations had put public pressure on institutions such as the American Museum of Natural History. In more than 30 years, the museum has repatriated the remains of approximately 1,000 people to tribal groups; It still houses the remains of about 2,200 Native Americans and thousands of funerary objects. (Last year, the museum said it would review practices that extended to its largest collection of about 12,000 skeletons by removing human bones from public display and improving the storage facilities where they are kept.)
One of the top priorities of the new regulations, which are administered by the Department of the Interior, is to finish the work of repatriating native human remains in institutional funds, which number more than 96,000 individuals. according to federal data published in the fall.
The government has given institutions until 2029 to prepare human remains and funerary belongings for repatriation.
In many cases, human remains and cultural objects contain little information, which has slowed repatriation in the past, especially for institutions that have sought rigorous anthropological and ethnographic evidence of links to a modern native group.
Now the government is urging institutions to move forward with the information they have, in some cases based solely on geographic information, such as in which county the remains were discovered.
Some tribal officials have expressed concern that the new rules will result in a flood of requests from museums that may be beyond their capabilities and could create a financial burden.
Speaking in June to a committee reviewing implementation of the law, Scott Willard, who works on repatriation issues for the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, expressed concern that rhetoric about the new regulations sometimes made it seem like Native ancestors were “disposable items.”
“This ‘give everything away right now’ garage sale mentality is very offensive to us,” Willard said.
Officials who drafted the new regulations have said institutions can get extensions to their deadlines as long as the tribes they are consulting with agree, emphasizing the need to hold institutions accountable without burdening tribes. If museums are found to have violated regulations, they could be subject to fines.
Bryan Newland, assistant secretary of Indian Affairs and former tribal chairman of the Bay Mills Indian Community, said the rules were drafted in consultation with tribal representatives, who wanted their ancestors to regain dignity upon death.
“Repatriation is not just a rule on paper,” Newland said, “but it provides really meaningful healing and closure for people.”
