and the Power of Shuar Shrunken Heads,” Cultural Anthropology 22, no. 3 (August 2007): 357–399.
While some human remains were collected by museums as anatomical or anthropological specimens, others were turned into commodities when amassed as objects of spectacle. How museum collecting changed the popular perception of tsantas, known commonly as shrunken heads, is analyzed by Steven Lee Rubenstein in this article that emphasizes how Europeans trading with the Shuar people in South America led to a loss of their ritual meaning. “Trophies of colonial expansion acquired by Euro-Ecuadorians in the upper Amazon, they are instead presented as trophies of Shuar warfare,” he writes, “so that museums can present themselves not as collectors of shrunken human heads but as collectors of tokens of ‘Shuar culture.’”
James Riding In, “Repatriation: A Pawnee’s Perspective,” American Indian Quarterly 20, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 238–250.
From his perspective as a repatriation advocate with the Pawnee Nation, James Riding In chronicles the evolving challenges of working with museums to return and rebury remains looted from graves. His article was published six years after the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990, recognizing its limitations as some institutions “continued business as usual” while displaying Indigenous remains. His analysis includes an overview of how past legislation enabled the theft and display of remains and burial objects, such as the Antiquities Act of 1906. “With such laws stipulating the placement of remains, burial offerings, and other unearthed objects in public institutions forever, universities, state historical societies, museums, and federal agencies became mausoleums,” he writes.
Andrew Gulliford, “Bones of Contention: The Repatriation of Native American Human Remains,” The Public Historian 18, no. 4 (Autumn 1996): 119–143.
“It is no accident that vast collections of skeletal remains, grave goods, and Indian artifacts came to repose in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History along with elephant tusks, ostrich eggs, and reptile skins,” observes Andrew Gulliford, reflecting on how graverobbing of Indigenous burial sites became an accepted practice in scientific study, even leading to museums competing to control burial mounds. After looking back at the foundation of many American museum collections on Native American human remains, he cites recent returns following the passage of NAGPRA, although his affirmation that the “long-term storage of Native American human remains begun in the nineteenth century is over” now reads as optimistic nearly three decades later.
Julia A. Cryne, “NAGPRA Revisited: A Twenty-Year Review of Repatriation Efforts,” American Indian Law Review 34, no. 1 (2009–2010): 99–122.
In this overview of twenty-five years of repatriation efforts under NAGPRA, Julia A. Cryne notes its limitations and shortcomings, such as the lack of enforcement penalties for meeting deadlines to notify tribes of remains, the limited scope in focusing on museums that receive federal funding, and the permission for only federally recognized tribes to request repatriation of remains. “It is a law almost entirely without teeth,” Cryne argues. “The complete lack of mechanisms to ensure compliance is counterproductive to the core purpose of the Act: to allow for repatriation of Indian remains and sacred objects.”
Sonya Atalay, “Indigenous Archaeology as Decolonizing Practice,” American Indian Quarterly 30, no. 3/4 (Summer–Autumn 2006): 280–310.
In reflecting on decolonizing archaeology in this history of stolen heritage, Sonya Atalay writes, “We must ask questions such as, What does it mean to have one’s history, story, or knowledge examined, interpreted, and displayed by ‘outsiders’? Who has access to this knowledge? Who has the right to examine it, to write about it?” Atalay discusses the role of museums in the context of this need for a transformation of the field, especially as at the same time Indigenous people were being forcibly relocated,