stitution’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, stripped of their religions, and killed in warfare, anthropologists, archaeologists, and other collectors were stealing their remains for study and exhibitions in museums across the globe.
Katie Stringer Clary, “Human Remains in Museums Today,” History News 73, no. 4 (Autumn 2018): 12–19.
As Katie Stringer Clary observes, although many museums have human remains in their collections, whether full skeletons, mummies, artifacts made from bones, or less obvious objects like Victorian memorial hair wreaths, “there are few clear legal or ethical guidelines that apply to all collections.” While NAGPRA in 1990 offered some protection to Native American graves and looted objects, “there are no similar museum guidelines for remains of people of African, European, Asian, or other ethnic descent.” This is still the case years after the publication of this article, which gives a detailed summary of human remains in American museums and museums around the world, with Clary concluding that museums must focus on “respect and consent” in addressing the ethical issues of these collections.
Uli Linke, “Touching the Corpse: The Unmaking of Memory in the Body Museum,” Anthropology Today 21, no. 5 (October 2005): 13–19
The touring Body Worlds display of dissected bodies is among the most sensational and controversial anatomical exhibitions of the twenty-first century, particularly because of its shadowy sourcing of corpses without clear donor consent. It has subsequently inspired numerous copycats. Uli Linke focuses on its presentation in Germany, “where the contact with mutilated corpses, previously evocative of war and genocide, has been rendered safe in the cocooned space of the museum.” These corpses have been preserved with a plastination process that gives them an appearance of life yet reduces their presence as individuals, which Linke sees as a contrast to earlier anatomical museum displays. “The dead, robbed of their humanity, display their seemingly un-dead bodies with a scientific objectivity that undoes and negates the m