Rae Gould, executive director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Brown University and a member of the Hassanamisco Band of Nipmucs of Massachusetts, said it’s common for institutions to say they can’t figure out who they should return remains and items to. “ The Repatriation Project,” an ongoing investigation by ProPublica and NBC News, has found that some of the nation’s most renowned museums have exploited loopholes in the law to hold on to Native American human remains and related items.ĭ. Instead, ProPublica found, the museum prioritized the scientific study of Native American human remains over their return. In its initial inventory, the museum declared 98.4% of the Native American remains in its collections “culturally unidentifiable,” and after completing required tribal consultations in the mid-1990s, it did close to nothing to advance repatriations for more than 20 years. NAGPRA does not require absolute certainty in order to repatriate.ĭickson Mounds Museum in Lewistown in August 2022. Those decisions were based solely on geographic, scientific and historical evidence - including the maps and journals recorded by Europeans during their travels down the Mississippi River in 1673 - despite the law requiring institutions to also weigh linguistics, folklore and oral history. ProPublica found that the museum avoided repatriating any remains dating to before 1673, when European records of the area begin, which marks the start of what archaeologists call the “historic era.” Museum leaders believed anything older than that could not be traced to living people and therefore could not be repatriated. That is among the lowest return rates in the country. In three decades, it has returned only 2% of them - 156 individuals - to tribal nations who could claim them under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Federal records show the Illinois State Museum has reported that it holds the remains of at least 7,000 Native Americans. The remains at the Dickson Mounds Museum, which is a branch of the Illinois State Museum, account for a sliver of all the Native American human remains still in the hands of the state of Illinois. Contractors installed cedar floorboards over the pit. The exhibit closed in the early 1990s, after Congress passed legislation requiring museums to begin returning Native American human remains and funerary objects to their rightful owners. The tent was put up to protect the Native American remains while Dickson performed his excavation work. Don Dickson, a chiropractor, began the excavation of the Dickson Mounds site, located on his family farm near Lewistown, Illinois, in 1927. The exposed human remains were used for decades to teach schoolchildren, visitors and local residents about what the museum presented as a long-gone culture of Illinois Indians.ĭr. In 1945, the state of Illinois purchased the site and later expanded it into a museum. They charged visitors 50 cents for admission. He left them in place, and his family turned the excavation into a roadside attraction they called Dickson Mounds. Then in the 1920s, a chiropractor named Don Dickson dug open the mound, eventually exposing the remains of hundreds of Native Americans. Beneath the south wing of the museum where he’s interim director are the remains of at least 234 of his ancestors.įor more than 800 years, they lay undisturbed, carefully buried inside a mound of earth overlooking a quiet valley and a slow river. (Sky Hopinka/Sky Hopinka for ProPublica)Įvery day when Logan Pappenfort is at work, he tries not to dwell on what’s under his feet. Logan Pappenfort, a member of the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma and interim director at the Dickson Mounds Museum, is part of a group who have started to confront the history of the museum, including its lack of repatriations, August 2022.
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