The remains of more than 500 Native Americans at a local museum have yet to be made available for return to their tribes.
But representatives of the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico said they have repatriated many other remains in the collection and they are working with tribal officials in the state and elsewhere to return more to where they belong. The remains that haven’t been made available for return have not yet been definitively identified, they said.
No ancestral remains are on display, museum director Carla Sinopoli said, and the museum does not allow research on them.
“Beginning in 2019, Maxwell Museum staff undertook a detailed review of all objects in our permanent exhibition People of the Southwest,” a February post on the museum’s website states. “This review identified objects that should be taken off display out of respect for our tribal partners. All of these objects have been removed.”
According to a dashboard published by ProPublica in November, UNM has the 33rd-largest collection of unrepatriated Native American remains in the U.S., but has made the remains of 844 people available for repatriation already. The remains of at least 583 Native Americans have not been made available for return.
Sinopoli said the Maxwell is currently consulting with tribes to “get the ancestors back home.”
She said the museum is working with all 23 New Mexico tribes and pueblos, and that repatriation is a priority for the museum.
“It’s very tragic that it happened in the first place,” she said.
“[Repatriation] is not only the right thing to do, it’s the law,” she added, referring to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, passed by Congress in 1990 and signed into law by President George H. W. Bush. That law provides for the protection and return of Native American human remains, funerary objects (items buried with humans), sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony.
In his 2004 book American Indian Law in a Nutshell, Federal Appellate Court Judge William Canby wrote that the act says Native American remains and associated funerary objects belong to lineal descendants. If lineal descendants cannot be identified, Canby wrote, they belong to the tribe on whose lands the remains were found or the tribe having the closest known relationship to them.
Records and technology helpful
Many of the items the museum has are documented in the original researchers’ field notes, including when and where the remains were excavated.
Researchers can use that information to figure out which Indigenous groups were present when the remains were interred — the first step in finding out to whom they belong. Sinopoli said about 800 people’s remains have been returned to their tribes so far.
Ash Boydston-Schmidt, who oversees the museum’s compliance with the federal law, said Maxwell doesn’t do destructive analysis — taking samples from teeth or bones — without tribal approval.
Boydston-Schmidt said archaeology in the 1920s was a new field, grounded in since-abandoned ideas of colonialism. She said archaeologists still want to learn about historical people, but with tribes’ informed consent.
“We want to support communities, not just extract from them,” Boydston-Schmidt said.
Sinopoli said one holdover from the COVID-19 pandemic is that people and organizations are engaging in more remote conversations, which allows museum staff to work more productively to find the rightful place for objects or remains. There may be several conversations concerning one set of remains before a repatriation can be executed.
Some of the remains at the Maxwell are held in repository, on behalf of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Bureau of Land Management and other agencies, Boydston-Schmidt said.
She said museums across the country, including those in Santa Fe and Andover, Massachusetts, as well as at Harvard University are making efforts to repatriate remains.