AN ERA OF HEALING REPATRIATION OF NATIVE ARTIFACTS OFFERS CHANCE TO CLOSE THE RIFT BETWEEN THE MAKERS AND THE KEEPERS          
Run Date        1/2/1994       Day     Sunday 
Page    F1     Section         Lifestyles     
Illustrator     PHOTO BY JIM LAVRAKAS AND BOB HALLINEN 
Story Byline    By SANDI McDANIEL Daily News reporter  

      Wrapped in a plastic baggie and sealed in a cardboard box somewhere in the Anchorage Museum of History and Art is a mummified human hand. Were the hand, shriveled and frail, taken from some foreign and ancient tomb, you might marvel at its antiquity and wonder about the culture that preserved it. You might be grateful at some remaining evidence of that society and clues it could provide in the riddle of our own human history. But what if the hand belonged to your grandfather? Your great-grandfather? TX: In 1990, after a long, emotional and embittered plea by Native Americans, Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. It mandated that all museums accepting federal subsidies return collections of skeletal remains, sacred objects and funerary artifacts to America's indigenous people. It also called for the return of objects of cultural patrimony those having ongoing historical, traditional or cultural importance central to Native Americans. The U.S. Constitution or the Bill of Rights would be such objects to all Americans. The legislation should ensure that the frail, fisted hand in the Anchorage Museum will be released to racial descendents, should they request it. As the red tape of repatriation slowly begins to untangle, cases like the mummified hand with its veil of spiritual mysticism and potential for controversy will be played out countless times around the nation. Like every story, there are two sides to this one. But there are many viewpoints. On one side of the raided sepulcher are the makers, or more precisely, their descendents indigenous peoples who can prove their lineage entitles them to ownership of human remains and artifacts long lost to them. On the other side are the keepers. Museums, yes, but not buildings. Not cold, airless rooms of numbered drawers and boxes. But people. Men and women who have devoted their professional lives to studying, interpreting and preserving the cultures of others. As a way of learning more about who we are by examining those who came before. Can the keepers, who have come to rely on the objects they may forfeit, understand what reclaiming them will mean to the makers? Can the makers understand what they have meant to the keepers? ALASKA RICH WITH ARTIFACTS At this point, there are far more questions than answers. How will museums manage this massive task? How will Alaska's villages raise funds to retrieve the scattered items they want back? How can they afford to house or rebury them? Will some cultures have elders left who remember the significance of antiquities? Who will arbitrate disputes between museums and Natives? Between rivaling Native claims? So far, both makers and keepers agree on one point. They need to talk. In November, Alaska's museums, rich with artifacts of Northern cultures, met a federally imposed deadline requiring extensive summaries of their vast indigenous collections. The summaries were mailed to more than 750 Native councils and other bodies representing Native Americans around the country. The University of Alaska Museum in Fairbanks mailed out 549 summaries detailing more than 5,000 ethnographic artifacts. Most went to Alaska Natives. The magnitude of the project is staggering. It affects hundreds of museums and Natives nationwide. About 200 of 500 museums belonging to the American Association of Museums estimated their combined holdings of just artifacts at 3.5 million pieces. "I don't think anybody anticipated how much work there is to be done," said Tim Cochrane, a cultural anthropologist for the National Park Service in Alaska, which must also survey its collection. The Smithsonian Institution recently set up its first field office in Anchorage, in part to deal with the task of repatriation. In a second phase of the law to be completed in two years, museums must provide Natives with summaries of archaeological material. This could be artifacts, but would more often include human bones, shards of pottery, flints of stone, anything excavated in a dig. The UA museum alone holds about 1.5 million such items. DUST TO DUST Ancestral remains will most likely be reburied by Natives. A striking example of that in Alaska is the reburial of 756 Kodiak Island remains in 1991. For years, Larsen Bay Natives had requested their return from the Smithsonian. At the time, Rick Knecht, a Kodiak archaeologist, suggested the bones be buried in sealed coolers in case they are needed again for legal purposes. But the Tribal Council said no. They saw no difference between bones 2,000 years old and those from the early 1900s. They returned their ancestors to the earth, still in 370 numbered boxes. The bones had been methodically removed in the 1930s most from a grassy hill islanders came to call the Boneyard. The desecrator was a renowned Smithsonian scientist, Ales Hrdlicka, intent on proving a link between the Americas and Asia by measuring Aleut craniums. His archaeological methods left a bitter residue. In short, he didn't ask. In a more recent case, the remains of a Point Hope woman and child were returned to North Slope Natives by an Ohio family last March. Their dehydrated bodies had reportedly been shipped out of state by a prospector and displayed in turn-of-the-century peep shows. Inupiats buried them in the village cemetery with dignity and prayers. Not all Native groups insist on reburial. Some have cooperated with archaeologists staging digs on tribal land. And at least one tribe Outside agreed to store repatriated bones in tribal mausoleums rather than rebury them. While some Natives accuse museum curators of warehousing human bones like safari trophies, curators have responded that skeletons are like books they have stories to tell we haven't read yet. Over the years, science has gleaned untold information from Native remains, particularly regarding questions of diet, disease and culture. Archaeologists exploring the development of early North American cultures in the future, however, will be challenged to overcome a tragic legacy of acrimony and mistrust. A HUMAN RIGHTS BILL And then there is the matter of artifacts. The makers have long returned to dust. Should their possessions articles of priceless value to anthropology be returned to erode in the grave beside them? Congress left it up to Native Americans to decide. In many cases, repatriation may mean the reburial and ultimate destruction of objects from which anthropologists have learned volumes. Artifacts we have admired in museums will vanish. Generations that follow will never see them, except in photographs. We will never learn more from them than we know right now. So be it, said Aldona Jonaitis, director of the UA Museum. "I feel that if a community wishes to rebury its ancestors and the artifacts that its ancestors placed in this grave, that is their right." There is no question of a loss, she adds. But: "What I'm saying is that in my set of values, human dignity and human life and death are more significant than the research that could be done on those artifacts." Others may not agree. "I know in the Lower 48 these conversations are pretty ugly," said Cochrane of the Park Service. That's why consultation between museums and Native leaders will be so important in the coming years, said Gary Selinger, UA Museum collections manager. It is his job to build a data base outlining the museum's archaeological material a collection that dates to 1926. Despite the tedium of the work, Selinger is philosophical. "I think the repatriation legislation is essentially a human rights bill, and personally I'm in favor of it." WE'LL CALL YOU One month after mailing out summaries, the UA Museum was receiving up to five letters a day in response from Native American groups interested in learning more about its collection. On the North Slope, inquiries poured into Keepers of the Treasure, a Barrow organization coordinating repatriation for North Slope villages. They came from "places you never heard of," said the organization's president, Jana Harcharek. They contained listings of a handful of items or thousands. Harcharek, who is Inupiaq, advised village leaders to contact the many museums they received summaries from to say thank you for the notice we'll be in touch. Some Native groups have already written the UA Museum asking for photographs. Others are making plans to visit Fairbanks. Some say nothing on the summary list seems to fit. "We're looking at something that's going to be a lot more complex to administer here in Alaska than in some of the smaller states," said Harcharek. Museums have been preparing for repatriation for years, but Native groups are just now learning what's out there for them to reclaim. And there is no statewide agency to coordinate it all each Native community must work on its own. For that reason, Harcharek is piecing together a repatriation guidebook and a workshop for Natives, to be held in Anchorage in September. She hopes to attract speakers like Denver attorney Walter Echo-Hawk of the Native American Rights Fund, who was instrumental in repatriation legislation. And anthropologist Tim McKeown, program leader for repatriation at the National Park Service in Washington, D.C. Some communities, like Bethel and Barrow, are planning cultural centers that will house repatriated objects. But that is beyond the scope of most Alaska villages. The main trouble is money. Congress failed to provide any. Not until very recently did Congress appropriate grant money: $2.3 million to be shared between museums, who need it for research and inventory, and Natives, who need it for freight costs and travel. The money is to be administered by the National Park Service. But Harcharek fears what materializes for Alaska's villages will be no more than "drops in a bucket." Finally, no one anywhere has offered museums reimbursement for their artifacts. "Museums have a lot of money tied up in some of these pieces," said Janelle Matz, assistant curator at the Anchorage Museum. Taxpayer money. Some of these artifacts may be priceless, she points out, but they weren't free. CONFUSION MARKED BY UNCERTAINTY When Matz attended an Alaska museums workshop in Fairbanks recently, she noticed that many professionals came away with opposing interpretations of the legislation. "We're defining the law a little differently from other people," she said of the Anchorage Museum. Unlike the UA Museum, which sent out notices of every item it owned, Anchorage notated only those its staff judged would fall under repatriation they identified 89 potential cases. They were quite liberal, said Matz. But Cochrane of the Park Service worries. Some museums may be making uninformed judgments about what should be on the list. There is no repatriation police, no one to say the nation's museums have been thorough in their summaries or even attempted to honor the spirit of the law. Plus, he suspects many museums simply do not have the time, the money or the expertise to deal with it. "NAGPRA presumes that the people who are writing the letters know what they're talking about," he says. But how many curators in the Lower 48 can draw the fine lines of distinction on an indigenous map of Alaska? Rachel Craig, an Inupiaq from Kotzebue, is one of three Natives serving on a national review committee of seven people that includes museum representatives, anthropologists and archaeologists. The committee exists to interpret fine points of the law and mediate disputes. A recent disagreement has already taken members to Hawaii. "We really take all testimony into consideration," she says. "For the first time, we're also taking spiritual testimony . . . that has as much weight as the other evidence." The committee has only the authority of recommendation, but it carries weight, says Craig. Disputing parties understand the political implications of not complying. She anticipates a busy schedule in the next few years. "We're not sure what the future will bring. I just have a feeling we will be more and more involved in disputes. . . . I think there are others that are brewing." In many cases, curators struggle with incomplete information. "Museums have notoriously poor records," said Matz. They may be of little assistance in determining how an item was acquired and if it falls under repatriation. Was the article sold to a collector by a Native individual who legally owned it? If so, on what basis should it be returned? There is confusion and frustration among Natives as well. Harcharek understands the law to say Natives must legally prove what belongs to them. "Exactly how you go about proving a certain mask is a sacred object I'm not too sure yet," said Harcharek. "If the museum records do not indicate when these objects were removed from a grave, there is no way of knowing if they're originally from a grave. "I just foresee that there's going to be a lot of questions coming up." AN ERA OF HEALING Matz, a trained anthropologist, has worked in the Anchorage Museum for six years. When she first discovered the mummified Aleut hand which has never been displayed she assumed it was a talisman. Before contact with Russians in the 1700s changed their culture, Aleuts sometimes hacked off the hand or finger of a great hunter when he died and used it in ceremony. Like other animistic cultures of that era, Aleuts were not qualmish about corpses and frequently mummified relatives a stillborn child might be sealed in a cradle and kept in its mother's quarters until she became pregnant again. Matz was disturbed when she learned the hand was donated to the museum in 1983 by an assistant of Ales Hrdlicka, the Smithsonian anthropologist. It had probably been taken from a rock crevice or cave where for hundreds of years it had been preserved naturally by dehydration. Matz had never been comfortable having charge of the hand, and now felt even less so. Bob Stanton of the Aleut Corp. said it is too soon to say what will happen to the hand the corporation is consulting University of Alaska anthropology professor Douglas Veltre. Matz believes such remains should be repatriated, but has mixed feelings about some artifacts. "There are going to be some pieces that I'm going to feel badly about leaving the museum," she says. She points out a telling irony. In some cases, Natives have consulted anthropologists to help them determine what might fall under repatriation. Anthropologists can help them because they've been able to study artifacts provided by museums. Gently, Matz displayed a few items that may be forfeited under the law: a fearsome, Yanyeidi-clan wolf headdress used in burial ceremonies as early as 1900. A fine, Chistochina chief's necklace of beads and dentalium shells. A miniature potlatch paddle, once bold with reds and blacks but now faded and cracked. A Point Hope whale vertebra carving of a spirit man with an antenna to guide him on his journey. It is a professional hazard, this attachment. What Matz and other curators are hoping is that in many cases, repatriation will be symbolic. That Natives will agree their artifacts, especially those requiring the specialized care of a museum, should be left in trust where they are. Perhaps there could be an agreement, said UA Museum director Jonaitis, that no one sees or looks at certain objects without a tribe's permission. There has long been a bitter rift between museums and America's indigenous people. Without mutual respect and understanding, that rift will easily widen, said Matz. She, like many others on both sides makers and keepers hopes that in the end, repatriation will be the beginning of an era of healing.        

Cutline         Janelle Matz, assistant curator at the Anchorage Museum, holds a Taku Tlingit wolf headdress that the Yanyeidi clan in southeast Alaska has requested be returned.