Last spring, the now-infamous
Ward Churchill, University of Colorado professor of ethnic studies,
gave a talk at Colorado College about the contents of our
institutional closets. He claimed that we had the bones of 139
people — all Native Americans — hidden on campus.
Churchill used this number to demonstrate the
college’s complicity in the crime of grave-robbing that has
plagued native groups all over North America. These charges worried
me, and I did some asking around, which, of course, is just what
Churchill hoped would happen.
I found that Churchill
didn’t know the whole story, though he came close. The
college was completing the complex process of repatriating bones
and sacred objects, which means returning them to the tribes they
came from.
Churchill was right in that the college had
“owned” a significant collection of human remains, and he was right
to question the ease with which bone-hunters and collectors in the
late 19th and early 20th century wandered onto Native American
lands and dug up bones, pots, rocks and other objects by the
truckload. Soon, museums and universities all over the U.S.
contained the dead relatives of native people.
The
numbers are impressive: A small city of the dead, at last count
110,000 individuals, now resides in federal and private museums.
The story of these skeletons housed at Colorado College
— how they got there, and how they are now being returned
— reflects a major change in the way we deal with this issue.
Like many other institutions, Colorado College collected human
remains. Many came to the college as part of archaeological
research by faculty, and others were donated by alumni, local
citizens, or other colleges and museums. For much of Colorado
Springs’ history, Colorado College had the only museum in
town, so the college ended up with a significant collection of
archaeological remains and displayed them in a large campus museum.
It’s hard, now, to understand why scholars and the
institutions they represented found it desirable to dig up, study,
hoard and display the bones and sacred objects of other
people’s dead relatives. It seems ghoulish, but there are
very real benefits from this research to human life: Scientists who
study bones can learn amazing things about what people ate, how
diseases spread, how humans metabolize toxic chemicals, and how
people treated each other in the past. Ironically, many of these
bones, collected to show hard and fast racial boundaries, are now
used as evidence of the plasticity of genetic variability.
But now, because of the vehement objections of living
people, the great grave-robbing spree has ended. What’s left
are closets filled with bones, and it’s a messy process for
an institution to figure out an ethical course of action. The
legislation in the Native American Graves Protection and
Repatriation Act, passed in 1990, gave institutions a mandate to
return bones and funerary objects to their rightful places.
The problem of how and where to return all of the
remains, many of which were unlabeled, unnamed, unclaimed, remains
a challenge. At Colorado College, which had closed its museum in
the 1960s, and sent most of its collections to other places in the
state, no one considered that the federal law would apply. But when
the college’s legal counsel, Loretta Martinez, discovered in
2002 that the college still possessed remains of native people, she
began the process of repatriation.
With the help of
faculty anthropologists and a consultant, we found the bones of 39
individuals and determined the cultural affiliation of 36 of them.
Most came from the Colorado Plateau. Once an inventory was
completed, the college contacted tribes in the region to see who
could take the remains. Not all tribes can take on this task, which
involves complex negotiation, expense and red tape, as well as
cultural minefields. But some tribal groups have become experts on
how to repatriate people in appropriate ways.
The
Southern Utes and the Hopi, in the case of Colorado College’s
skeletons, agreed to repatriate individuals who had come from the
region that these tribes now occupy. Over the past year, the
college has assisted the tribes with transfer and reburial, part of
the process required by federal law.
It will take more
time before all the skeletons have been removed from our closets,
but making sure these individuals are returned to the right places
with the right procedures requires time and care. The people we dug
up without much concern a century ago deserve at least that much.
Anne Hyde is a contributor to Writers on the
Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org).
She is a professor of history and director of the Hulbert Center
for Southwest Studies at Colorado College in Colorado
Springs.
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