In August, the University of North Dakota published a statement acknowledging finding remains of over 70 ancestral Native American bodies and hundreds of sacred artifacts in a storage area on campus. In the few weeks since, the University of Alabama, University of Kansas and the University of Texas were subjects of related news stories.
The Government Accountability Office reports that universities and museums in the United States hold the remains of over 116,000 ancestral Native Americans. These staggering numbers reveal a story about how scientific racism positioned some groups of people not just as inferior, but as objects of research. Defenders of these collections claim that they should be able to continue to own them and pursue research on them as a matter of academic freedom. But this is a distortion of the concept.
The roots of these collections trace to the 19th century when measuring skulls became a way to assert that racial hierarchies were innate. Samuel G. Morton, a professor at the Pennsylvania Medical College, assembled a collection of over 1,000 human crania from around the world, some collected on battlefields, others robbed from graveyards, to delineate evidence for racial hierarchies.
The “objective” measurements assembled by Morton and others not only cast non-White people as scientifically subordinate but were used as tools to justify enslavement of Africans and campaigns against Native Americans.
For instance, politicians seeking to expand the territorial reach of the United States offered related claims in debates leading to the 1830 Indian Removal Act. Henry Clay, John Calhoun and others argued that American Indians were incapable of adapting to the expectations of “civilized” life. In his 1830 State of the Union address, Andrew Jackson justified removal of Indians from the eastern United States so they could “cast off their savage habits and become an interesting, civilized and Christian community.”
The new discipline of anthropology that solidified between the 1860s and 1900 inherited these ideas and approaches. Anthropologists continued to use collections made in support of scientific racism, like Morton's. To these were added others of dubious origin. In 1868, the U.S. Surgeon General initiated the collection of Native American remains for the Army Medical Museum from sites ranging from battlefields to hospitals under military control, “to aid in the progress of anthropological science by obtaining measurements of a large number of skulls of aboriginal races of North America.”
Researchers in new university museums and anthropology departments also undertook excavations at former sites of Native American towns, like Moundville, the source of most of the ancestral remains reported this year by the University of Alabama. Because of U.S. policies like the Indian Removal Act, however, the Native American tribes and nations claiming the ancestors once buried at Moundville now live as far away as Oklahoma, Louisiana and Florida.
Even in the early period when anthropologists first conducted excavations, Indigenous communities objected to exploitation of the burials of their ancestors. Anthropologist Chip Colwell has cited records of protests from as early as 1883 by Apache people objecting to thefts from a site in Arizona. Protests occurred across the United States. Colwell has documented that Shinnecock tribal members warned archaeologists to stop excavating ancestral burials on Long Island in 1902.
Yet with the passage of the 1906 Antiquities Act — which allowed excavations on federal land as long as they were “for the benefit of reputable museums” and so long as collections were “made for permanent preservation in public museums”— researchers had the law on their side. Shielded by burgeoning ideas of academic freedom, White university-based researchers saw the world — and especially the parts of it inhabited by non-White communities — as specimens.
Coordinated Native American activism in the 1960s began to change this situation. In 1971, the American Indian Movement interrupted excavations in Minnesota and other locations across the country. They demanded that the bodies of ancestors in museum collections be returned to communities for reburial. These efforts paved the way for the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in November 1990. The act required institutions receiving federal funding to complete detailed inventories of human remains and funerary objects, including results of consultation with Native American groups, by 1995.
But this process was slow, hampered by a number of factors — the scale of the collections, poor documentation, the demand on tribes to consult on collections, the discovery of new collections that have been tucked away and forgotten. Most important was the lack of regulations on what to do with the vast majority of remains that were labeled “culturally unidentifiable,” either because the group they were from had no descendants that could be agreed on through consultation between scientists and tribes, or their descendants were known, but not part of a federally recognized tribe.
Few institutions met the 1995 deadline, and individual extensions were repeatedly granted.
As university officials directed staff to chronicle their holdings, researchers debated the academic implications of this shifting legal framework. While some scholars accepted the rights of Native Americans to determine the disposition of community ancestors, others objected vehemently. UCLA professor Clement Meighan argued in 1994 that reburial was “the equivalent of the historian burning documents after he has studied them” that would make it “impossible for scientists to carry out a genuinely scientific study of American Indian prehistory.”
In a few places, researchers claimed their academic freedom would be violated by implementing the law. For critics, some of whom continue to resist repatriation today, academic freedom means an unconstrained ability to pursue research, regardless of how those endeavors damage descendants.
This issue, of course, is not unique to physical anthropology. Researchers have a long history of treating communities as sources of knowledge, extracted without sincere engagement. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study is possibly the most notorious example in the United States where, for 40 years, U.S. Public Health Service and Tuskegee Institute researchers tracked Black men infected with a treatable disease without offering that treatment to observe its long-term effects. More recently in 2004, the Havasupai sued Arizona State University over use of DNA samples, granted for research on diabetes, for other purposes.
Turning the page on this history requires more than returning ancestral remains to their rightful resting places. The United States government has proposed new regulations that reduce barriers to repatriation created by interpretation of the concept of “cultural affiliation.” Models are already emerging for how to combine academic and community interests in research. These models recognize and address the ways in which fundamental frameworks of research and reigning ideas of academic freedom elevated the concerns of researchers over the people being studied. Community engagement has now become the recommended approach even at universities that once were most resistant to returning ancestral remains for reburial.
