Who gets to decide whether Native American objects on display in museums belong there or not?  Is it the museum, which views its role as one of preserving the past and safeguarding historical artifacts for the public?  Or is it the people whose ancestors actually made the objects, or in some cases, actually are the objects?

Chip Colwell’s excellent study of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and its impact on museums and tribes wrestles with these questions.  Far from a dry recitation of legal arguments, the detailed description of NAGPRA’s development and implementation is clear to the layman, and the book’s extensive notes will satisfy the scholar.  The prose is lucid and vibrant.  In the first few pages, Colwell writes a dramatic scene about meeting with tribal representatives to return the skeletal remains of their ancestors.  The meeting is intensely emotional; some members of the delegation walk out, explaining that “only witches and lunatics fool with the dead.”  And Colwell, a curator of Native American artifacts at the Denver Museum of Art and History, realizes “I was hired to be a paradox. […]  I was the museum official put in charge of administering the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.  […]  My job was to both protect and return the collections I oversaw.”

Plundered Skulls focuses on four distinct efforts by different tribes to recover human remains and assorted funerary and sacred objects from American museums, and in doing so, describes the emotionally-charged, negotiations that lead to repatriation.  The book recounts efforts by Zuni Pueblo members prior to the passage of NAGPRA to recover their War Gods — sacred spirits carved of wood that provide protection for the tribe — stolen by private collectors and museums in America and Europe.  The second section describes how the Cheyenne and Arapahoe made use of NAGPRA to secure the return of scalps and other remains taken from the Sand Creek Massacre site.  Section 3 details the loss and eventual recovery of a Killer Whale Flotilla Robe belonging to the Tlingets of Alaska.  And the final section of the book describes the complex process of repatriating Native American skulls of the extinct Calusa tribe in Florida to their cultural cousins, the Miccosukee.

The stakes of repatriation are high.  Anthropologists and archeologists want to preserve Native American remains for their cultural and scientific value.  As Colwell puts it, the study of human remains can provide critical data about “environmental change, gender roles, human health, migration patterns, ancestral identities and much more”  On the other hand, the tribes are likely to view the display of ancestral remains in museums as a violation of the dead, and feel that they have a spiritual obligation to recover and rebury them.  “Native Americans argued that looted collections debased their ancestors and impeded their religious freedom.  Many blamed the social ills devastating their communities — poverty, alcoholism, crime, violence — on the ancestral spirits that haunted the halls of museums.”

The case history of each tribe’s efforts to repatriate relatives is highly detailed and complex.  In the hands of a less-skilled writer, the subject matter might become dull and repetitive, but Colwell’s prose is lively and filled with astonishing insights.  Describing negotiations to return remains from Sand Creek, he writes, “The Cheyenne chiefs suddenly realized, as so many Indian leaders would in years to come, that the Smithsonian Institution is the largest Indian cemetery in the country.”  Abhorrent 19th-century attitudes toward Native Americans justified the exploitation of remains for dubious scientific research.  For example, one learns of the grave-robbing that occurred on behalf of aristocratic collectors, and of the pseudo-science of Craniology that resulted in the collection and study of skulls to measure their cranial capacity and argue the inherent intellectual and cultural inferiority of Native Americans.

Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits is a challenging book on several levels, but it amply rewards the reader.  There are other works that address similar themes — Finders Keepers by Craig Childs and a chapter about Effigy Mounds National Monument in Terry Tempest Williams’ The Hour of Land come to mind.   They each add to the discussion, but do not go into the level of detail about NAGPRA this book does, and are not narrated from the unique perspective of an archeologist and museum curator.  With a firm command of his subject, but with a focus on the human consequences of the collection and display of remains and sacred objects in museums, Colwell concludes: “Through the years I have learned that repatriation is not a dispute about material things, body parts, or sacred objects.  Repatriation is about people — their views of faith and science, morality and mortality.  NAGPRA doesn’t decide who owns the past.  Rather, the law establishes an arena and set of rules — a ‘mediating space’ — in which people must negotiate their interests.[…]  Ironically, repatriation, one of the most divisive controversies across Native America in the last generation, does not have to be a wedge.  It can be a bridge between cultures.”

Colwell  conveys the history and complexity of Native American repatriation issues in organized, highly readable, and engaged prose.  He bridges the divide between anthropologists, archeologists, and museum curators on the one hand, and Indigenous People’s rights and spirituality on the other.  This is a moving book which will change how you view the appropriation of spiritual culture.

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My wife and I were hosting out-of-state guests last fall and took them to one of our favorite places, Jemez Historic Site, nestled in San Diego Canyon in the mountains of northern New Mexico.  The ruins of a Spanish mission church sit atop the original pueblo village of Guisewa, and a cinder path meanders through the jumbled red rock.  It was a bright, warm day, and the combination of blue sky, green conifers, and ruddy sandstone made for a lovely walk.  An elder from the pueblo was on site to speak to visitors, and during the course of our conversation, we mentioned that we had recently stopped at Pecos National Historical Park, about 100 miles to the Northeast.  The old woman’s eyes misted over as she told us about

Her deeply felt words stayed with me.  Several months later at my local public library while browsing through the stacks, an unusual title on the spine of a book caught my eye: Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits by Chip Colwell.  I flipped through it, and when I  realized it was about the repatriation of Native American remains, I began reading and was hooked, instantly.  This was no dry, academic tome.

The sheer amount of information about his subject that Colwell has mastered is impressive, but he is at his best, perhaps, when he recounts the dramatic process of returning ancestral remains to the tribes.  It is during these encounters that a kind of grace is achieved, as museum curators understand and accept the need to repatriate the remains in their collections, and Native Americans lovingly receive the remains in a bittersweet resolution of their spiritual duties to the dead.

“The remains were laid out on a long table in the National Museum of Natural History. […] The cloth was peeled back.  Silence engulfed the room as the Cheyenne saw for the first time the bones of their ancestors.  Eighteen skulls were neatly lined up, each perched on a multi-colored Pendleton blanket. ‘That was a difficult moment for all of us,’ [a tribal elder] recalled. ‘You could see the bullet holes in some of the skulls.’  Other skulls seemed to be stained with blood.  A drummer started a deliberate beat then joined to it his wavering, plaintive voice.  The priest brushed each skull with a bundle of sage, and then lifted the skull as it was wrapped in the blanket and placed within the unadorned pine box.  One man with long, gray-streaked hair broke down — anger at the massacre and anger at the museum fusing into uncontrolled sobs. [A woman was]  invited to swathe the remains of the only female, a girl about thirteen killed at Sand Creek. […]  The room was mute except for her sniffling.  The top of the girl’s head was bashed, looking […] like a saber wound.  She kissed the girl’s skull and held it for a moment before placing it into the pine casket.  ‘Naevahoo’ohtseme,’ she told her ancestor in the Cheyenne language. ‘We are going back home’”  (pp. 92-93).

the migration of the last surviving members of Pecos Pueblo to Jemez (Walatowa) Pueblo — another Towa-speaking settlement — in 1838, and of the long struggle by the community to recover the Pecos members’ ancestral remains.  They had been excavated by the archeologist Alfred V. Kidder and shipped to Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology in 1929.  (See El Palacio 3 [3]: 43 Fall 2013)