Today’s blog is written by Dr. John McClelland,
Lab Manager for ASM’s Osteology Lab and NAGPRA Coordinator.
Most people think of museums as places where things are preserved in perpetuity. It may surprise you to learn that my job at the Arizona State Museum is to find ways to give things back! As Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) Coordinator, I supervise efforts to account for Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and other objects of central importance to tribes and to facilitate their return as required by federal law.
For tribes, this process is not only about the return of their ancestors and objects of spiritual importance, but also about restoring the social and spiritual bonds that were severed when a burial was excavated or a sacred item was removed from tribal control. Working with tribal representatives on repatriation projects has helped me to gain new perspectives on the past and present.
For many of us at the museum, this has set the stage for future collaborations with indigenous communities on other projects, such as the creation of new exhibits. This was the theme of a roundtable discussion – Beyond Repatriation: Forging Collaboration among Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Museums and Communities – that I took part in at the American Anthropological Association meetings held in San Francisco late last fall.
The panel included colleagues from museums in the United States and Canada. The most interesting thing was how similar our experiences have been despite operating under very different legal frameworks. Museums in the U.S. work within the guidelines established by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act while Canadian museums follow a set of voluntary guidelines known as the Task Force Report on Museums and First Peoples.
The Canadian panelists recounted their collaborative projects in the loan of museum collections to First Nation communities for ceremonial use and the involvement of indigenous curators in the revitalization of a museum diorama that had depicted indigenous people as “frozen in time.”
I recounted the Arizona State Museum’s long history of collaboration with tribal museums and communities and our current projects. Last year’s exhibit Through the Eyes of the Eagle: Illustrating Healthy Living is an excellent example of how involving indigenous organizations can improve an exhibit program and communicate a valuable message for an increasingly multicultural community. ASM staff are currently engaged in collaborative interactions with tribal museums on the Arizona Memory Project and the O’odham Pee Posh Documentary History Project. These projects not only make documents or photographs available to scholars, but are also of great value to Native communities in maintaining and strengthening links to their past.
ASM’s Southwest Native Nations Advisory Board with museum director Dr. Beth Grindell, curator Diane Dittemore and archaeologist Dr. Chuck Adams at May 2012 meeting in Window Rock, AZ.
There is, in general, among museum professionals a much greater appreciation of the importance of welcoming indigenous communities to our museums than there was prior to the repatriation era. All of us on the roundtable panel agreed that we could do more to collaborate with indigenous museums and communities in designing new exhibits, increasing accessibility of museum collections to indigenous communities, facilitating loans of museum collections to tribal and First Nation museums, and especially to do more in welcoming indigenous colleagues to the profession of anthropology. The visitor experience will be immeasurably enhanced if we succeed in these efforts. Stay tuned!
