Good afternoon. My name is Diana Warring and I'm the Director of the Interior
Museum, and it is my pleasure to welcome you here today for our lunchtime lecture
series. Each month we focus on one of our various bureaus or our partners or the
ways that our bureaus interconnect on a various number of themes throughout
America and abroad. Emily Palus is joining us today, she has
coordinated management of federal museum collections and compliance with the
Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, for nearly 20
years with the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the
Interior Department former colleague here at the Interior Museum.
She has spearheaded initiatives as well as guided others to partner and
negotiate with museums and universities holding federal collections to develop
innovative solutions for preservation needs, access and use for research, and
education coordination with descendant and resource communities and
repatriation. Please join me in welcoming Emily Palus.
Good afternoon everyone. I'm just delighted to be here with you today and
pleased to return to the Interior Museum, where I started my career with the
department as an intern in 1999. So any interns out there, or especially National
Council for Preservation Education interns - that's where I got my start, so
I'm pleased to be back. Many thanks to Diana for this invitation
to participate in the monthly lecture series. The title of my talk is Far From
Home: Bringing Archaeological Collections and
Ancestors Home to Alaska. We'll focus on a recent interagency effort to retrieve
a sizeable collection of Native Alaskan ancestral remains, or human remains, and
artifacts collected 70 to 110 years ago from public lands in Alaska. The
collections were curated in a prominent East Coast institution, but we
took the effort to move the collection and return to Alaska, placing it in
another reputable institution. Some of the
collections will remain there and some will be repatriated to descendant
communities. My role in this project is not one of being an expert in Alaskan
archaeology. My role is much more that of perhaps expediter or facilitator
in this process. This case study provides a valuable and perhaps lesser-known view
into some of the Department of Interior's work and responsibilities to
the American public regarding care of museum collections, artifacts, specimens
recovered from the public lands, and the associated records. It also highlights
responsibilities for upholding the rights of Native American - the rights of
descendant communities to Native American human remains, and certain
categories of cultural property. And it also shows a thoughtful consideration of
the wishes of local and regional communities to retain a connection to
the antiquities or the archaeological resources associated with their home as
a source of identity, pride, and in some cases, heritage tourism and economic
opportunity. So as I narrate this story I'll aim to weave in some of these
broader concepts and frankly address some uncomfortable histories, which
provide context for this story, and illustrate current responses to some of the
history of archaeology, certainly changing museum practices, the role of
the federal government in upholding a public trust for the care of collections,
and particular responsibilities to Indian tribes, Native Alaskan villages,
and corporations. So over the last century, researchers from across the US
and Europe explored Native villages and archaeological sites across Alaska,
collecting human remains and artifacts from the public lands. This case is but
one, and I want to caution that some of the images I'm going to share are going
to include exposed burials of human remains and skeletal remains. So let's
begin. In July of 2017, so just not quite a year ago, a team representing the
Bureau of Land Management, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park
Service, along with representatives from the University of Alaska Fairbanks
Museum of the North, retrieved 38 individuals, 13 sets of Native American
human remains, and 1,592 artifacts from the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and
Ethnology at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
These ancestors and collections originated from Alaska and there are
three circles that plain you can see. The green circle through the top the world,
Twin Islands and Jones Island, we'll talk about that expedition. St. Lawrence
Island, subject to two of the expeditions, and the Aleutians focusing on that
island. So let's learn part of their story beginning not when they lived, but
after they were buried, and when they were found by explorers and researchers
and made into museum collections. The first collection was made 110 years ago
with Anglo-American Polar Expedition, which intended to look for undiscovered
lands in the Arctic aboard the Duchess of Bedford, a schooner with no engines. So
powered only by wind. The expedition was led by a Danish naval adventurer,
and American geologist. You can imagine that these types of expeditions required
a lot of coordination, and a lot of resources - they needed sponsors. Apparently
to satisfy one of the funders, the expedition added an ethnographic
component. So Mr. Stefansson, who was an anthropologist associated with Harvard
University, was hired to study the natives encounter during the expedition,
and acquire artifacts for the Peabody and Royal Ontario Museums.
So I want to give you a sense that this is really on top of the world, where these
guys are in their wind powered schooner. The Duchess of Bedford became locked in
ice and ultimately destroyed, and a camp was set on Flaxman Island, here, using the
remains of the ship to build a cabin in the area now just north of the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge in the Beaufort Sea. And this location actually is on the
National Register of Historic Places, principally associated with the
geologist Leffingwell, who used this as his campsite made out of the former
schooner, for several seasons. Stefansson the anthropologist ultimately left the
expedition and lived with the Inuit of the Mackenzie Delta in Canada over 1907,
1908, over the winter. And following that experience, the Arctic remained the
focus of his research and studies for his career. For instance, between 1906 and
1918, Stefansson undertook three long expeditions, living with and among the
Native villages in Alaska and Canada, adopting the native way of life, which he
chronicled in his book, for instance, his 1922 book "My Life with the Eskimo."
Stefansson pioneered research into Arctic living and methods for enduring
or really thriving in this harsh environment. This included a low
carbohydrate diet, focused on meat and fish, so perhaps he was a forefather to
Atkins. While I joke and perhaps take some
liberties here, but a point is that this is the first expedition that brought this
young researcher to the Arctic and it would be the focal point of his career.
But I digress, this story is about the human remains and artifacts that he
collected. I mentioned that Stefansson was tasked with making excavations and
collecting for the Peabody and Royal Ontario Museums, and he did. 221 items were
deposited at Harvard University's Peabody Museum, according to their
records, including human bones, fishing and hunting equipment, pipes, weapons and
tools, ceremonial objects, jewelry, and bone ornaments. And he took fairly
detailed notes, and they're in narrative form and give a sense of the excavation
and camp life. For instance, he wrote on June 11th, 1906 on Flaxman Island,
"Skeleton and ravine bank, southeast part of island near native houses. Apparently
body had been deposited in ordinary blog grave. Later erosion and lateral
development of river had caused bank to crumble, and bones of wood had tumbled
about and mixed. Only small part frontal bone showed above turf. From buried
position and absences of regular
parallel logs, the native Saxawanna told us that he inferred the man to have
been murdered and hidden, but the geologic explanation seems more
reasonable to me." On Jones Island he later wrote on July 22nd that same year,
1906, "last evening I commenced digging in a trench along the seaboard wall at
the kashim," or house, "but found the drift of sand so deep that I thought
it hopeless with one spade and shortness of grub to try it.
You see our food supply will surely not allow us to stay more than three
days, and the boys are already fearing possible starvation. I must give up
digging for the present, for the inlet waves to take off the sod and wait for
the Sun to do its work" - meaning melt. "The following objects were found:
flint chipper; mallet of antler found in wall on broad level, detaching pieces
from spear slightly in grave, found in wall, ground level; matlack blade of whale's
rib" and he goes on. As I mentioned, 221 artifacts were accessioned by the
Peabody Museum from this expedition, from various locales. And this included ten
sets of human remains and 41 objects - 41 artifacts - twelve clearly from graves,
based on his descriptions, from Flaxman, Jones, and Twin Islands. These were
federal lands. The Antiquities Act of 1906 had passed that same summer, and
required any gatherings of relics and examinations of ruins to be conducted
with a permit. But although this expedition didn't have a permit, the
federal hook was established. Materials from federal land needed to be deposited
in a public museum in perpetuity. Now I'm going to come back to the Antiquities Act, but
let's move on to our next expedition. A few years after the American Polar
Expedition, Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Biology participated in
an expedition in 1913 throughout Alaska in the Bering Sea. Aboard a little schooner named the
Polar Bear, a party of private big-game hunters and scientists from Harvard, the
Smithsonian, and the University of California set off to make an exhaustive
study of animal and bird life. During their year-and-a-half journey, the crew
visited the Aleutian Islands, Point Hope, Atka, Russia, Herschel Island, Chukchi
Peninsula known Indian points that vary at Point Barrow. And throughout their voyage,
the crew killed and recovered countless numbers of arctic birds,
walruses, mountain sheep, and whales. Facing a similar fate as the Duchess of
Bedford, the Polar Bear was also trapped in ice, but she was not destroyed. Four
crew members actually went over land, and the remaining crew camped on the edge of
the world, waiting eight months for the ice to melt the following spring. And
I traced this, I think, to actually a similar location as to where the other boat
froze, which was over here, so we're still up at the top of the world.
No one perished, which is amazing to me, however one of the crew later wrote
a book about his experience, and it was called Icy Hell.
It sells on Amazon for over $600. I should mention that this expedition was
heavily recorded by - there were a lot of photographers on this expedition.
So there's a fair number of photos, some available online, others in archives. But
as you can see it was principally focused on natural history and big-game hunting,
but along the way the ship encountered natives who traded, educated, and helped
them, and a number of them joined the crew. One of the passengers, Bernard
Kilian, noted in his journal one particular couple who he was quite fond
of, Mr. and Mrs. Itloon. And they stayed with him for a week, and sharing their
stories from their culture, and imparted knowledge about their way of life.
Bernard wrote that his stay with Itloon and his wife was one of the
highlights of his trip, and he enjoyed every minute of it.
So this expedition was principally a natural history tour for research and hunting
and then there is this ethnographic, cultural, early cultural tourism approach,
but the group also conducted some excavations - why not? - collected some human
remains. We know that during the expedition at least 11 skulls, human
skulls, were collected and then subsequently donated
to the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, who then turned and
donated them to the Peabody Museum, its sister
organization. A few years later another skull from the same expedition was
donated, so somehow it didn't make the first transaction. We know this from
the museum records maintained by the institution. Seven of those skulls
were from St. Lawrence Island, which was federal land administered by the
General Land Office at the time, predecessor to the Bureau of
Land Management. And here I'm showing you some specimen tags and a portion of
the accession ledger. And on the map, I'm showing you one where they
took the knife this is in blue, this is St. Lawrence Island.
You can also actually see that the accession ledger has lots of information.
"Skull with mandible," "St. Lawrence Island, Bering Sea."
So over the next 30 years, expeditions still undertaken to the Arctic for
research on both the indigenous population and archaeological remains.
Researchers such as Ales Hrdlicka, Otto Geist, Ted Bank led teams, raised
students, made collections. One of Hrdlicka's students was William Laughlin,
who made his first trip to Alaska in 1938, and he returned in 1948 a PhD
candidate at Harvard. Laughlin directed the expedition to the
Aleutian Islands to study and report on the history, culture, language, physical
condition, and origins of the Aleutian people. The expedition was funded by
Harvard, the Viking Fund, and a contract through the Navy Research Group, which
the latter of which focused on biomedical research of the native
population. To quote from the expedition proposal and description, "the object of
the research is to look for physical and cultural adaptations made in answer to
the demands of their particular environment. Living
population and the physical and cultural remains of their forebearers and
archaeological sites will be studied. The headquarters of the expedition will be
at the village of Nikolski on Umnak Island, where tests at the prehistoric
population of the village indicate a continuous occupation from the time
of the original settlement of the islands, the living population of
skeletons from the prehistoric periods at Nikolski, and at other sites will
provide a complete record of the history of mankind on these islands."
So Laughlin studied in the population of Nikolski on Umnak Island and also
excavated their old village site which included the Chaluka Mound, an area of
occupation for almost 4,000 years. One of Laughlin's students later described the
expedition, "they excavated by day, took measurements and blood and recorded ethnography
at night." And I want to read an excerpt from a journal from
one of the expedition team members, a man name by Alan May, who, if I can say I almost
find charming. His journals are really a wonderful record of their
life, their expedition, and quite informative on their day to day,
and their research interests and, frankly, some of their interpersonal conflicts.
"Third Tuesday, June 29th, 1948. A light rain this morning but out to work anyway,
much against Shay's wishes," Shay was another archaeologist on the
expedition. "Left the skeleton I exposed
yesterday in the hopes that perhaps it might dry out a bit.
We have now acquired a ladder which is most useful. The ladder is quite useful
going from one level to another and much safer than climbing up
sides each time. Soon after starting work, I found a baby skeleton but the skull
was smashed. Another ivory labret turned up, bone points, fish, herbs, awls, flakers,
and reams, pins, adzes, scrapers, grindstones, and wedges were also found.
By noon we were pretty dirty and wet, so we spent the afternoon indoors. I cleaned
and segregated and Shay did at last started cataloging. This
was really piling up on us and I was glad to get started. Tonight everyone
went to church after supper to take photos. By that point going
to church with the villagers of Nikolski.
As I have some, I did not go but stayed here and cleaned up some specimens and bones.
Information from the natives is being slowly acquired. Vegetation that is
used as medicine, for food, myths and so on. There is one about an old stump
which is said to be under a little building near the church. When this stump,
or post according to some, grows tall enough to knock the ball off the top of
the building then the whole life of the natives will be completely changed or
the world will come to an end. There seems to be a chance that their life may
be changed shortly, for there is rumor that the Army may take over the entire
island. If the ball should happen to fall at the time they were evacuated, then of
course their superstitious believe would be much enhanced. We learn also
that there is a ghost here, something called the 'outside man.' It seems that
many believe in it and some will not go in the dark, but none of them scoff
at it." The next day, June 30th, Wednesday. "It was
raining hard this morning so we could not go to work. Worked on records, made
maps of the site, and so on. After lunch the rain was not so heavy, so we went out.
A piece of pottery, or something that looked very much like it turned up.
A skeleton of a youth, about 10 years old, was uncovered in the late afternoon, his
head under a rock. This was somewhat of an unusual burial in that the
body was extended and on his back. The first of this type of burial I have seen
here - normally they are flexed." And it goes on, he journaled every day.
One of my interests in the journals and the archival records is being able to
tie that information ultimately to the individuals and the artifacts we
ultimately recovered, and will be doing documentation on. But let's stick with
Laughlin, in 1949 he completed his dissertation with this research from the
'48 expedition. And last summer while I was in Cambridge I had the opportunity
to review his work. And I'll confess it was a bit of a personal experience
for me because for many, many years I had been trying to get information about
this collection, and I thought if I find the dissertation then surely that
will tell me all about this collection. And so I opened it up, and the spine
creaked, and the archivist said "I think you might be the first person to look at
this." To which my heart sank. And then I opened it up
and I started flipping through, and I realized that 90% of his dissertation
is on the biomedical research that he did on the then-current population, and about
10% is a comparative to 11 skulls. He collected more than that. There was
nothing on the material culture. So it was kind of this shocking moment okay,
okay, you need to find more than that, how else are we going to find out about
these artifacts? Will we find field notes? And we have found some – May's
journal I actually found last month. So it's coming together. But anyhow, so
there were no reference to the artifacts, although these would later be studied by
students, and Laughlin moved on to have a prominent career in physical anthropology,
moving to the University of Oregon, University of Wisconsin, the
University of Connecticut, and ultimately retiring in 1999, and he has since passed
away. His primary field of specialization was physical anthropology including the
Aleutians and Siberian studies, human biology, population history, and human evolution.
And over the years he made over 20 trips to Alaska, to the Aleutians, to study its
peoples, to dig, to collect. His research there culminated in the publication of a
1980 book, "Aleuts: Survivors of the Bering Land Bridge." We have so far found
collections made by Laughlin in eight institutions so far, and counting. But
from this particular trip he deposited 1,655 items to the Peabody Museum, we know
from their records, including human remains and artifacts, bone points, harpoons,
stone scrapers - all of the archaeological material he recovered on his trip from
federal lands administered either by the Bureau of Land Management or by the US
Fish and Wildlife Service. So last July we, being BLM and Fish and Wildlife,
retrieved 21 sets of remains and 1,542, and so if you're tracking all of my
numbers, that's not everything. But that's what the museum had. So as I've talked
about these collections in these three expeditions I paused and always noted
that there is a connection to federal lands - General Land Office, Bureau of Land
Management, US Fish and Wildlife Service. So what? Why does land status matter?
Why would the BLM and the US Fish and
Wildlife Service all these years later have a current interest in these
collections? What is the federal interest? What's the
federal role? What is the federal responsibility to the American public?
To local communities, researchers, Indian tribes, Native Alaskan villages
and corporations, Native Hawaiian organizations. This interest, the
roles and responsibilities are defined in a suite of laws enacted by Congress
with varying regulations, further implementing this direction which
fundamentally outline a philosophy and a set of values: that
archaeological resources are significant, important to all Americans, and that
descendant communities may have particular rights and interests. So let
me just give you a quick overview of these authorities and direction to put
current Department of Interior bureau activity
into context. So there's a long history of federal protections for antiquities
going back to 1906, with an act for the preservation of American antiquities,
signed by President Theodore Roosevelt. This was a visionary act to safeguard
archaeological and historic properties on federal lands from haphazard digging and
looting. While the Antiquities Act is most often referenced in current media
today regarding presidential establishment of monuments, in the
context of collections and management of archaeological sites, this Act
established that archaeological sites are most valuable for the information they
contain or their commemorative associations, not as commercial resources
like timber or minerals, that have primarily a monetary value. The
Antiquities Act declared the first federal policy that the management of
archaeological sites was in the public interest, asserting that permits for the
examination of ruins, the excavation of archaeological sites, the gathering of
objects of antiquity, may be granted to institutions deemed qualified. That the
examinations, excavations, and gatherings are undertaken for the benefit of
reputable museums, universities, colleges, and other scientific or educational
institutions, with a view towards increasing the knowledge of such
objects and gatherings made for permanent preservation in public museums,
public interest in these materials. This act established the
United States government responsibility to manage cultural resources and initiated
regulation of the investigation of those resources. So flash forward to the
National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, sets out a very broad federal historic
preservation policy and among many value statements,
purpose statements, the Congress finds and declares that the spirited direction
of the nation are founded upon and reflected in its historic heritage. And the
cultural and historic foundations of the nation should be preserved as a living
part of our community life and development in order to give a sense of
orientation to the American people that historic properties
significant to the nation's heritage are being lost or substantially altered,
often inadvertently, with increasing frequency and that the preservation of
this irreplaceable heritage is in the public interest. So
that in spite a legacy of cultural, educational, aesthetic, inspirational,
economic, and energy benefits can be maintained and enriched
for future generations of Americans. So among the many sections of the
National Historic Preservation Act, one section directs the creation of
regulations for the management of archaeological or art collections associated
with historic properties. I'll come back to that in a moment, the curation
regulations. But let me cover the successor to the Antiquities Act, if
you will. So 73 years after the Antiquities Act was enacted, in 1906,
have proved to be insufficient to protect archaeological sites that were
increasingly threatened and damaged by unauthorized excavation and pillage. So
Congress enacted ARPA, Archaeological Resources Protection Act, in 1979 to
further solidify federal policy that archaeological resources on public and Indian
lands are an accessible and irreplaceable part of the nation's heritage, and they are
increasingly endangered. ARPA was enacted to secure for the present and
future benefit of the American people the protection of these resources and
sites on public and Indian lands. This statute builds on the Antiquities Act
with more refined provisions regarding permitting investigations, and retains
the requirement that collections be deposited in a public museum for the long
term or in perpetuity. So not a statute, but I referenced that
NHPA gave direction for promulgation of regulations, as did ARPA for management
of archaeological collections. So Curation of Federally Owned and
Administered Archaeological Collections, those regulations were made final or
promulgated in 1990 and they established definition, standards, procedures, and
guidelines to be followed by federal agencies to preserve collections of
prehistoric and historic material remains and associated records. Covered
under the authority of the Antiquities Act, Reservoir Salvage Act, which I didn't
mention, National Historic Preservation Act and Archaeological Resources Protection
Act, the federal agency official is responsible for the long-term management
and preservation of pre-existing and new collections. Such collections shall be
placed in a repository – museum, university, institution - with adequate
long-term curatorial capabilities and so on.
Why? Why do we need these regulations governing collections?
Well federal property should be cared for to particular standards, and outline
the values and interests of the public in these collections, these
artifacts, laid out in the Antiquities Act, the National Historic Preservation Act,
and the Archaeological Resources Protection Act, that they needed to
be preserved and maintained to particular standards for the long term
or in perpetuity, and made available for research, exhibition, and
other appropriate uses. So, so far I've talked about public interest and benefit,
but there are classes of objects so important to American Indians that
Congress passed another law to assure Native American's right to them, in the
Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act enacted in 1990. NAGPRA
protects ancestral remains or NAGPRA addresses Native American human
remains and funerary objects, as well as sacred objects and objects of cultural
patrimony. The statute upholds the rights of Indian tribes, Native Alaskan villages
and corporations, and Native Hawaiian organizations the right to control the
disposition of their ancestors and certain categories of cultural property.
The law requires federal agencies and museums receiving federal funds to
document and inventory their collections, consult with Indian tribes, Native
Alaskan villages, and Native Hawaiian organizations, determine descendant or
who has rights or cultural affiliation, and upon a valid claim, repatriate. This
law established a responsibility for federal agencies and museums to act,
to inventory their collections and consult. So this responsibility for
conducting this work is based on a concept of control, and for federal
agencies this can tie to land. So control rests with the agency that managed the
land at the time the collection was made. Given the sensitive nature of these
materials and deadlines this work has been met with a sense of urgency. But
before I return to our case study, let me share a few challenges land
management agencies face in meeting these responsibilities for collections
care and its appropriate documentation, consultation, and repatriation. Under both the
Antiquities Act and the Archaeological Resources Protection Act permitting
standards, a museum had to be identified in the permit application, and that would
receive the collection, and a catalogue of what was collected be included in the
final report. There is nothing that required further follow-up by the
agencies, and in fact it wasn't until 1984 that most Interior bureaus had
authority to issue their own permits. Prior to that, the Office of the Secretary
issued permits, from 1906 to 1968, and the National Park Service Departmental
Consulting Archaeologist on behalf of the bureaus did serve until 1984.
Between 1906 and 1986, more than 3,000 permits were issued. So in 1990,
Curation and Regulations are issued, Native American Graves Protection and
Repatriation Act is enacted, and most agencies did not have readily available
information about the location, scope, and content of collections, basically relying
on museums housing them. So most successful NAGPRA compliance projects
were achieved through collaboration and a little bit of funding between the museum
holding the collection and the federal agency from
which lands the items were removed. So with that background, let's return to
our Alaska collections and providing for the appropriate care and responsiveness
to descended Native Alaskan communities. So the Bureau of Land Management and
with our partner, US Fish and Wildlife, we're responsible for ensuring the care
of these collections - they came from BLM and Fish lands.
According to 36CFR79, the Curation regulations covers preexisting
collections, basic professional standards for providing preservation protection,
and appropriate access and use. Of course NAGPRA requires the agencies to inventory
collections of the human remains and cultural items and report those to Indian
tribes, and through consultation determine affiliation - who has rights to
the remains and cultural items. These responsibilities apply, regardless of
physical custody or possession. So from 1907, 1915, and 1948, we have 3 collections
from expeditions I walked you through. They were from federal lands and they were
housed at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The collections were actually not made under a permit issued under the Antiquities
Act, so there was no firm trail, but they were from federal land. So the BLM
had collections and potentially repatriation responsibilities and didn't
even know their collections existed. This is one of the challenges we face. However
we did learn about the collections over time. In 2001, Peabody Museum contacted
the BLM lead archaeologist in Alaska inquiring about land status of several
locales. Well BLM often knows land, and we know land
jurisdiction. So my colleague went through the list of locales the Peabody
asked about and identified GLO, General Land Office or Bureau of Land Management,
US Fish and Wildlife Service, US Forest Service, State, or Other, and specifically
identified BLM locales named Flaxman, Jones, and Twin Islands. Oh,
and St. Lawrence Island, the first two expeditions I mentioned. So a strong focus
at this time in 2000-2001 - NAGPRA's enacted in 1990 so about ten, eleven years later -
a strong focus of museums and federal agencies regarding museum
collections was the need to address Native American human remains and
inventory requirements. Some museums were figuring out the scope of their
responsibilities. Their collection was federal land, and they could identify the
agency, maybe that would become the agency's priority and not theirs. But
responsibility was not always fully clear, and there are different
perspectives and interpretations that have evolved over time. So
for instance, wouldn't an institution that sponsored
expeditions and actively made these collections, have some responsibilities
to inventory them for this repatriation statute? Well there are different
interpretations on this. But after a few exchanges between the museum and the
BLM in 2001 and outreach to the respective tribes, the matter
actually lay dormant. In 2009 I come on the scene and I was contacted by a
consultant working for the Chaluka native corporation, letting us know about
the 1948 Laughlin material. We initiated a discussion with the Peabody
Museum about that collection, which apparently had not been tagged as
potentially from federal lands. Our need to address NAGPRA remained urgent and
compounded by learning of this other collection which turned out to be quite
sizable, 16 individuals, approximately 1,600 artifacts. The Peabody Museum
acknowledged the BLM's assertion of control and responsibility
for the collection, and explained that all services and activities the museum
would now charge the BLM. This was not a unique stance but happened to change from
other museums and universities we have worked with where we had partnered, perhaps with
some financial support, but nevertheless collaborated on this inventory and
documentation work. But this was to be a contractual relationship. The BLM
requested estimates to inventory the collection so that we could complete our
baseline NAGPRA work. The following year my
colleague, BLM Alaska archaeologist visited the museum in 2010, met with staff
and learned that there was no active research on collections. and that they no longer had an
active Arctic Studies program. Further, that their facility was quite full and
that the museum would be amenable to transferring the collection to another
institution. So the BLM then requested an estimate for both an inventory of the
collection and to ship it. At first, we had aimed to partner with the museum to
complete the NAGPRA work but really, over time, it seemed appropriate to move their
collection given some of the capacity constraints that the museum had. And so
we looked to another partner and specifically the University of Alaska
Museum of the North in Fairbanks, which is the main repository for
archaeological collections in Alaska, with whom the BLM and other federal
agencies have a very strong relationship with the state-run institution. We had
completed several successful NAGPRA projects and also just general
collections management work with them. And we note, and we had relied upon them
for their technical support, their ample Arctic expertise, their knowledge
of sites, locales, artifacts, and importantly, relationships with Native Alaskan
villages. And while at first we were focused on the NAGPRA
collection, we then looked at the entirety of the collection materials - the
human remains and certain classes of artifacts, but then everything
to move to the Museum of the North. The proximity, expertise, and
relationships would help with NAGPRA, and for the non-NAGPRA material, the
collections could be incorporated into the Museum of the North's collections,
part of an active research and education program for the university, immediate
Fairbanks community, Alaska more broadly, including extension programs across the
state. The Museum of the North was also very interested in returning collections
to Alaska as so many collections have been made from their state during
these historic expeditions and dispersed across the lower 48 states and beyond.
We had consulted with Native villages who had requested that their ancestors
be returned home, and also that all of the collections from their communities
be returned to Alaska. And I'll also note that in the 1990s, 2010s was
not the first time many of these villages had asked about the collections
that had been made. Through some archival research for this project and another
one, I found a lot of requests, especially in the 1970s for, where village leadership
is asking archaeologists if they come and dig, to leave the materials there or
ship them back. And in fact in 1977, William Laughlin, who's
kind of been an interesting character to me but the more
I get to know him through archives, the more complex character - in 1977 he frantically
tried to create a museum in the village of Nikolski, and laid out some pretty
extensive plans and lining up funding. He was also looking towards his
retirement, and while I've just been talking about what was at Harvard
Peabody, remember he made another 19, 20 trips to Alaska.
And all that material was in Connecticut and would need to go
somewhere. Ultimately a museum in the village of Nikolski was not constructed.
That collection actually ended up in the Museum of the Aleutians. So why Museum
of the North? Sorry, just to kind of catch you up on this institution and
requisite facilities, community relationships. So a plan was forming, key
details not settled, and over the next several years, discussions circled
between the agency asking for estimates and the museum actually asking to verify
control - that the BLM did indeed have legal responsibility. And I will say
we're kind of a…we're not looking for work.
This is not intended as any kind of overreach, we were trying to ensure that
we met our obligations under the statute to descendant communities and to the
American public for the broader collection.
So the BLM and the Peabody are trying to, at the same time, BLM and the
Peabody are going through and trying to research and refine the information
about the collections because at this point we still don't have the full
inventory listing of the materials. So why wasn't this addressed sooner, why is
this taking so long? Land jurisdiction, not always clear, takes
expertise and time to verify. The Laughlin collection included materials
from sites on BLM lands, US Fish and Wildlife Service lands,
and it was all in one museum accession. So the museum looked at
it as one collection, and we would break it apart based on site or locale to
figure out land jurisdiction. And then the Navy had this interesting
relationship to this because remember, the Navy helped fund the expedition. And
so there was some thought that maybe the Navy had some authority over this
collection. Well, don't you love archives? We got a copy of the contract for Navy
research, which had nothing to do with the archaeological research
that was done, all having to do with the medical examinations and,
incidentally, the Navy wouldn't have had the authority to authorize the
excavation on another agency's lands. But we had to sort all of that out and
unravel it all and distill it simply down to collections from BLM or General
Land Office land - BLM responsibility, from Fish and Wildlife Service land - Fish and
Wildlife Service, Navy had no part. So finally in January of 2017, the matter
of control was settled and the Peabody agreed to move forward with transferring
the collection. By then cost estimates were irrelevant, because the BLM Bureau
of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, and the University of Alaska
Museum of the North, along with some local support from the National Park
Service in Charlestown, Massachusetts, next door to Cambridge, we formalized a
plan and in July 2017 we met with the Peabody staff, inventoried,
packed, and shipped the collection. So our final negotiations with the Peabody
resulted in transfer documents that we all signed, we agreed to the terms,
they assembled the collection and they provided us a space to work, inventory,
and pack, and they provided us a full catalog from their database. And over the
next few months, according to our agreement, museum staff diligently
supplied scans of all of the relevant associated documentation and records,
like field notes, that helped put these materials into context. The records are
critical to the research values and helping identify
descendant groups with rights to claim the human remains and other cultural
items. It's not just about the objects. So inventory and pack we did. Our process was
careful, planned - museum people are the best. These materials are fragile, delicate,
unique, sensitive, so the pressure was on to do a good and thorough job and
we documented every step of the way. So we track and locate an item with its
catalog number, we know which box it is in, which pallet it's on. Hyper
inventory tracking, because this is irreplaceable material. Now I also want
to pause and mention that, again, the Native Alaskan ancestors, these are the
boxes that they were in and I mentioned the dissertation, and I'm including this
plate which is from the dissertation this is the only plate, of the
11 skulls used for comparative research in the dissertation, this is the only one
that is a plate in the dissertation. So I noted that it has a
number, so I hurriedly went back to my team and asked do we have this one? My
team said no. We went back through all of the photos, we went back through the
photos the museum provided us, we went back through the photos that we took, we didn't have it.
So this one's still out there. I have a feeling it might be at the University of Oregon,
which is where Laughlin went next on his journey, and we are actually in
discussions right now with the University of Oregon for the Laughlin
collections that are there. Okay. It's hard not to get a little personal about
this. So more action. We loaded up our cargo vans and packed our boxes on
pallets and ultimately we had 4 pallets containing 21 boxes, 18 boxes of
human remains, those 38 individuals, and the hardest working team. And a couple of
Alaska Airlines flights later, the Museum of the North retrieved these
individuals and these artifacts in Fairbanks and brought them to the next
phase of their journey. And where they remain today,
almost a year later, the Museum of the North. The Bureau of Land
Management has been reaching out to the descendent communities who all
have an interest, I've listed them here because there are many given the nature
of the Alaska village corporation arrangement. So we're initiating
consultation and at the same time going through the collections that we
received from the Peabody and trying to connect it with the documentation that
was provided by the museum, as well as other information that we found. There
are 120 boxes of archival material from Laughlin in
Anchorage, for instance. So trying to put the collections
into context so we know where they came from, so that we can hurry their return
home if they're going be repatriated. If they're not subject to NAGPRA, that
information is valuable as their research interest. So over the last
century, as I mentioned, researchers across the US and Europe explored Native
villages and archaeological sites across Alaska, and this case is just but one. What
I find so interesting as I delve further into this project and those
related to it, because each one leads to another, the history of archaeological
and anthropological research in Alaska, and the number and complexity of
expeditions and the resulting collections. Massive quantities
of artifacts excavated from Alaska and subsequently curated in museums in the
lower 48, in Europe, and Canada. And part of what we're tracking is the history
of museums, for museums often would try to produce an encyclopedic
collection and have something from everywhere. But more and more, that focus is
more focused in on particular regions and regional institutions like the
Museum of the North or some of the other institutions that the BLM works with out
of the western states. There's a unique connection between the items,
the sites and the items, and the institution. People don't like their heritage to move
far away. So today, federal agencies and museums
curating federal collections, we have to collaborate on achieving our shared goals for
the best use and care of the museum materials. And while this case study
presents reasons for transferring a collection from one institution to
another, and these transfers can be complex, expensive,
time-consuming, and take much longer than you think they should, ultimately trying
to make a decision that's in the best interest of the collection and its
availability and benefit to the public, where there is current curatorial
research interest, access to expertise, and to honor the wishes of descendant
groups and source communities. And also to reveal some of the challenges of what
it means to manage collections for the long term or in perpetuity. Which is,
from the museum's viewpoint, in 1907, 1915, and 1948, Harvard Peabody was
actively trying to assemble a broad and extensive encyclopedic collection.
So where else do we go from here? I mentioned that each
one of these leads to another one. But for now, on this particular project,
having started it all those many years ago, we took a moment to celebrate a
major milestone in bringing these collections home but remain focused on
getting them the last leg of their journey. Thank you. [Applause]
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