Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 21, 1993 TAG: 9311200150
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: A-15 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Los Angeles Daily News
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES LENGTH: Medium
All of these pieces of the first Americans' past disappeared into museum collections.
Now, after a decades-long struggle, a federal law is giving Indians control over the contents of their ancestors' graves and burial grounds. Last week, museums and universities throughout the nation sent letters to the hundreds of tribes, clans and families whose relics they possess. The notifications are required under the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
"We have sent out 600 letters," said Kathleen Whitaker, chief curator of the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles.
The first portion of the two-part act requires any museum or organization that has used federal funds to provide the tribes with summaries of artifacts that were found in burial grounds; artifacts like a medicine bundle that belong to the tribe as a whole; or sacred or religious objects like the Zuni War God, which the Zuni Indians use in a ceremony and then leave in a cave to return to the elements.
The second portion of the act's requirements, which must be met by November 1995, requires a full summary of skeletal remains taken from graves and the objects buried with those remains.
At the end of the repatriation process, Indian tribes will be able to choose whether they want the items back, either for reburial or for their own museums, or whether they want the current caretakers to continue to curate their collections for them.
Among those bound by the repatriation act are federal agencies including the National Forest Service, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. military.
While most museum curators agree that Indians deserve to have control over their ancestors' bones and artifacts, they voice regret at the body of knowledge that will be lost if and when tribes opt for reburial.
"The positive aspect is that it is resulting in increased communication and increasing partnerships between museums and the Native American community," said John Johnson, curator of the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.
"As as a result, we've gotten much stronger ties with the Santa Ynez Indian Reservation and a number of people off the reservation."
But, the artifacts and human remains that are reburied won't be available for further study as scientific methods continue to evolve.
"The shortcoming of the law is its failure to recognize what will be lost," Johnson said. "If things are wholesale reburied, you will lose much of the knowledge about the development of Indian culture. It's through archaeology that we are able to see the evolution of the culture, and without the material remains to study, that knowledge will be lost."
Objects collected in the 1920s had to wait for the invention of radio-carbon dating in the 1940s for an accurate assessment of their age. Anthropologists believe science is just 10 to 15 years away from genetic testing, which will reconstruct the DNA in a bone.
"We are now able to go back to collections found in the 1920s, and we're able to go back with techniques undreamed of before, that we now use to study them," Johnson said. "And 70 years from now, there will be techniques that we don't dream of today."
Roger Colton, curator of archeology for UCLA's Fowler Museum, agreed.
"Ten to 15 years for genetic testing is a conservative estimate," he said. "People extract fairly long strands of DNA from bone right now. It's not too far down the road."
New scientific methods not only will extract new information from museums' holdings, they also can be used to test older theories.
"As methods improved, old results were modified and even rejected based on the newer methods of testing," Colton said. "That's what the scientific method is all about. Museum collections allow future researchers to evaluate other people's test results."
by CNB