Leading museums remove native displays amid new federal rules

The American Museum of Natural History will close two major galleries where Native American artifacts are displayed, leaders said Friday, in a dramatic response to new federal regulations that require museums to obtain permission from tribes before displaying or researching cultural objects.

“The galleries we are closing are artifacts from an era when museums like ours failed to respect the values, perspectives and even shared humanity of Indigenous peoples,” Sean Decatur, president of the museum, wrote in a letter to museum staff 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 the Great Plains this weekend, and close several other display cases of Native American cultural artifacts as it reviews its vast collection to make sure it complies with new federal rules. which came into effect this month.

Museums across the country have covered exhibitions as curators scramble to determine whether they can be shown under the new regulations. The Field Museum in Chicago has covered some display cases, Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology said it would remove all funerary belongings from its exhibits and the Cleveland Museum of Art has covered up some cases.

But the action of 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 strong message to the field. The museum's anthropology department is one of the oldest and most prestigious in the United States and is known for its groundbreaking work under a long line of curators, including Franz Boas and Margaret Mead. The closures mean that almost 10,000 square meters of exhibition space are no longer accessible to visitors; the museum said it could not provide an exact timeline for when the reconsidered exhibitions would reopen.

“Some objects may never be displayed again as a result of the consultation process,” Decatur said in an interview. “But we want 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, burial objects and other sacred objects. The process began in 1990 with the approval of the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, which established protocols for museums and other institutions to return human remains, burial objects, and other property to tribes. But because these efforts have dragged on for decades, the law has been criticized by tribal representatives as too slow and too susceptible to institutional resistance.

This month, new federal regulations came into effect and were intended to expedite returns, giving institutions five years to prepare all human remains and associated funerary objects for repatriation, giving tribes more authority throughout the process.

“We are finally being heard – and it's not a fight, it's a conversation,” said Myra Masiel-Zamora, archaeologist and curator at the Pechanga Band of Indians.

Even in the two weeks since the new regulations took effect, she said, she has felt the tone of conversations shifting. In the past, institutions often viewed indigenous oral histories as less convincing than academic studies when determining which modern tribes to repatriate objects to, she said. But the new regulations require institutions to “adhere to Native American traditional knowledge of direct descendants, Indian tribes, and Native Hawaiian organizations.”

“We can say, 'This has to come back,' and I hope there won't be any pushback,” Masiel-Zamora said.

Museum leaders have been preparing for the new regulations for months, consulting with lawyers and curators and holding lengthy meetings to discuss what might need to be hidden or removed. Many institutions plan to hire staff to comply with the new rules, which may require extensive consultation with tribal representatives.

The result is a major shift in practice when it comes to Native American exhibits in some of the country's most important museums – a change that will be noticeable to visitors.

At the American Museum of Natural History, portions of the collection once used to teach students about the Iroquois, Mohegans, Cheyenne, Arapaho and other groups will be temporarily inaccessible. That includes large artifacts, such as the birch bark canoe of Menominee origin in the Hall of Eastern Woodlands, and smaller ones, including darts dating to 10,000 B.C. and a Hopi Katsina doll from what is now Arizona. Student field trips to the Hall of Eastern Woodlands are being reconsidered now that they cannot access those galleries.

“What may seem out of alignment to some people is the result of an idea that museums put in amber descriptions of the world,” Decatur says. “But museums are at their best when they reflect changing ideas.”

The display of Native American human remains is generally prohibited in museums, so the collections under review include sacred objects, grave belongings and other items of cultural heritage. While the new regulations have been discussed and debated over the past year, some professional organizations, such as the Society for American Archaeology, have expressed concerns that the rules are overreaching in museums' collection management practices. But since the regulations came into effect on January 12, there has been little public resistance from museums.

Much of the human remains and indigenous cultural artifacts were collected through practices now considered antiquated and even odious, including donations by grave robbers and archaeological excavations that cleared indigenous burial sites.

“This is human rights work, and we should look at it as such and not as science,” said Candace Sall, director of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Missouri, which is still working to repatriate the remains of more than 2,400 Native Americans. individuals. Sall said she has added five staff members to work on repatriation in anticipation of the regulations, and hopes to add more.

Criticism of the pace of repatriation had put institutions such as the American Museum of Natural History under public pressure. In more than 30 years, the museum has repatriated the remains of approximately 1,000 individuals to tribal groups; it still contains the remains of approximately 2,200 Native Americans and thousands of funerary objects. (Last year, the museum said it would review practices that extended to its larger collection of some 12,000 skeletons by removing human bones from public display and improving the storage facilities where they are kept.)

A top priority of the new regulations, which are administered by the Ministry of the Interior, is to complete the work of repatriating the human remains of the indigenous population in institutional enterprises, which number more than 96,000 individuals. according to federal data published in the fall.

The government has given institutions a deadline giving them until 2029 to prepare human remains and their burial belongings for repatriation.

In many cases, human remains and cultural objects have little information associated with them, which has delayed repatriation in the past, especially for institutions that have sought demanding anthropological and ethnographic evidence of ties to a modern indigenous group.

Now the government is urging institutions to follow through with the information they have, in some cases relying solely on geographic information – such as in which province the remains were discovered.

Some tribal officials are concerned that the new rules will result in a flood of requests from museums that may exceed their capabilities and impose a financial burden.

In June I spoke with a Commission assessing the law's implementation, Scott Willard, who works on repatriation issues for the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, expressed concern that rhetoric about the new regulations sometimes made it sound as if Native ancestors were “disposable.”

“This garage sale mentality of 'give it all away now' is very insulting to us,” Willard said.

The officials who drafted the new regulations have said institutions can get extensions on their deadlines as long as the tribes they consult with agree, stressing the need to hold institutions accountable without overburdening tribes. If museums are found to have broken the rules, fines may be imposed.

Bryan Newland, the assistant secretary for Indian Affairs and former tribal president of the Bay Mills Indian Community, said the rules were developed in consultation with tribal representatives, who wanted their ancestors to regain their dignity after death.

“Repatriation is not just a rule on paper,” Newland said, “but it brings real meaningful healing and closure to people.”