the Hopi people.

Sincerely,

Robert Breunig, Ph.D.PresidentThe Museum of Northern Arizona

John BullaInterim Director & CEOHeard Museum

Janice KleinExecutive DirectorMuseum Association of Arizona

Jonathan BatkinDirectorThe Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian

Michael F. BrownPresidentSchool for Advanced Research

Christoph Heinrich, Ph.D.DirectorDenver Art Museum

Cc: Gérard Araud Ambassador of France to the United StatesThe Embassy of France to the United States4101 Reservoir Road, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20007 By e-mail: Gerard.araud@diplomatie.gouv.fr

Three related issues interwove themselves in my mind thanks to a serendipitous catching up with emails on this sunny Memorial Day weekend. Since "memorial" derives from the same Latin root as "memory" then it is particularly appropriate that, on a weekend when we are reminded to remember our war dead, the singular human capacity for memory and its verbal, visual and other articulations direct itself to related matters pertainingto the dead--and the living--from a range of different kinds of wars.

I was impressed by the youtube record of a brief speech by Eric Sundby, president of the student-run Holocaust Remembrance and Restitution Society at Oklahoma University in Norman, OK. The speech was in support of a resolution before the Oklahoma State legislature, HR 1026, that would call on the Fred Jones Museum of Oklahoma University to engage in a full process of provenance research.

In his speech, Sundby observed that, in practical terms, this means that the museum must both research the ownership history of objects in its collections that were acquired without the benefit of that research at the time of acquisition, and for which there is the possibility that they were stolen; and that it must