WHAT TO DO ABOUT NATIVE ARTIFACTS IN MUSEUMS?
In hindsight: Examining how museums acquired Native American artifacts can help all Americans better understand Native histories.
by Jubilee Marshall
Recently on Hindsights, historian and Egyptologist Kelly-Anne Diamond explored the role of museums in addressing legacies of colonialism. Her article focused on Egyptian artifacts, yet the questions of how museums should respond to these issues also applies to the case of Native American artifacts in collections and on display in U.S. museums.
Within the halls of the American Museum of Natural History, for example, Native American tribes such as the Hidatsa, Dakota (Sioux), Cheyenne, Arapaho and Crow appear as models in dioramas, depicted as distant and primitive peoples whose societies were less civilized and less technologically advanced as compared to their European counterparts. The museum welcomes millions of visitors per year, and this depiction creates the impression for visitors that tribal societies are remnants of the past — despite the fact that vibrant Native communities continue live on the American continent today.
This practice of exoticizing or historicizing Native Americans has long been an issue for major U.S. museums. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, for example, once included an exhibit on the Plains Indians featuring buckskin-clad mannequins holding arrowheads, falling into the same patterns of misrepresentation exhibited in the American Museum of Natural History.[1]
These dioramas depict indigenous tribes during the Contact Period of American history. During this period, Natives and European settlers engaged in brutal violence, and thousands of native tribes were ravaged by disease and forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands. A portion of the Native American artifacts within U.S. museums and historical societies emerged directly from this displacement, as settlers laid claim to objects left behind. These objects included some items sacred to Native cultures, such as pipes and wooden figures.[2]
Skeletons and human remains of Native Americans also arrived in the collections of research institutions like the Smithsonian as a result of these exchanges. The acquisitions of these remains often came as a result of body snatching by white intellectuals who, as phrenology became the pseudoscience of the day, were increasingly interested in studying a “prehistorical” subject such as the Native American.[3]In 1859, for example, the U.S. Surgeon General had recovered Native American skeletons shipped to the Army Medical Museum for a crania study.[4]
In treating these remains as collector’s items, museums of the past paid little regard the individuals who died or the significance of proper burial customs to a particular tribe. However, Native American advocacy groups have protested the inclusion of Native American narratives, artifacts, and remains in U.S. museums. Their efforts challenged these museum practices and over the past several decades have led to a growing movement for museums to address this troubled history and to be part of the pursuit of justice for Native Americans in the past and present. [5]
Back at the American Museum of Natural History, the museum’s 17th century diorama of Lenape natives interacting with Dutch settlers now features an interpretive overlay. After protestors pointed out that the display promotes an inaccurate vision of this encounter, staff at the museum have supplemented the original diorama with additional information designed to give visitors an understanding of how it falls short. Other museums have followed suit.
In recent years a parallel effort has emerged to return sacred artifacts to the tribes from which they originated. Spurred in part by the passing of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), passed by the 101st Congress in 1990, museums have also undertaken efforts to identify and return the Native remains they may have in their collections.
These efforts have encountered significant challenges.[6] At the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, a report published in 2010 by the Government Accountability Office stated that repatriation efforts are hindered by a lack of resources — both on the part of tribes that might be unable to provide the same quality of care for these items as would be found at a museum, and on the part of the museum, which lacked the staff or funding to establish clear historical connections between an object and tribe.
Despite these challenges, however, recent decades have seen museums make a marked effort to deal appropriately with these displays and artifacts within their walls. The aforementioned National Museum of the American Indian was itself designed as a response to the situation, one that would deliberately include Native voices at every stage of establishment and administration.[7]
As museums continue to wrestle with the presence of Native American artifacts on display and in their collections, they can look to the National Museum of the American Indian and the American Museum of Natural History to understand what strategies have been effective, and where difficulties have arisen. In doing so, museums will have the chance to take constructive action to pursue justice in a way that helps Americans better understand the legacies of colonialism and respects the needs and wishes of Native Americans today.
Jubilee Marshall is a History major at Villanova University with a concentration in Peace and Justice Studies. She is a 2018–19 History Communication Fellow at the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest.
[1] Amanda J. Cobb, “The National Museum of the American Indian,” American Indian Quarterly 29 (3/4): 361–83. doi:10.1353/aiq.2005.0083.
[2] Paul C. Rosier, “Repatriation of Ancestral Remains and Sacred Objects” (Native American Issues. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003).
[3] Rosier, “Repatriation.”
[4] Ibid.
[5] William S. Walker, “A Living Exhibition: The Smithsonian and the Transformation of the Universal Museum.” (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), 1–3.
[6] Rosier, “Repatriation.”
[7] C. Smith, “Decolonising the Museum: The National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC,” Antiquity, 79 no. 304 (2005).
