Returning Bones of Contention

By John Elson

Arriving at work one day, a Wasp lawyer for Washington's Smithsonian Institution finds a carton on her desk. She is stunned. Inside the box are some clumps of dirt and a note proposing that the contents -- the remains of her grandparents, freshly dug up from a New England cemetery -- be put on display by the museum. The sender is a part-Navajo conservator at the institution, furious that such a fate has befallen the bones of his ancestors.

That grisly episode (from Tony Hillerman's novel Talking God) is fictional, but it epitomizes the tensions in a dilemma that confronts curators, anthropologists and those Native Americans who angrily oppose them. To many scholars, and to much of the museum-going public, the Indian bones and burial artifacts are valuable clues to humanity's past. But to many Indians, these relics are sacred and the archaeologists who have appropriated them no better than grave robbers.

Last week the Smithsonian signed a landmark agreement with leaders of two national Indian organizations that both sides hope will help defuse the issue. The institution, which has 18,500 human remains and thousands of other burial artifacts, agreed to inventory its collection. Remains that can be clearly identified as belonging to an individual or a surviving tribe as well as all burial artifacts will be offered to the Native Americans for reburial. In return the Indians dropped their demand that the Smithsonian surrender all its remains, many of whose origins are unknown.

For the Indians, said Walter Echo-Hawk, senior counsel for the Native American Rights Fund, the agreement marks the "beginning of the end of their spiritual nightmare." In fact, some scholarly institutions have gone further: Stanford University has consented to return an entire collection of skeletal remains of 550 Indians, most of them from the Ohlone tribe, to their descendants. Nonetheless, many curators and anthropologists are worried that a sweeping national policy would empty museums across the land. Scholars argue that preserved skeletons and other human artifacts, particularly those of great antiquity, provide essential information on problems ranging from the organization of tribal societies to the origin of certain diseases, like rheumatoid arthritis.

To that argument, Native Americans answer that 1) most of the unearthed Indian bones lie moldering and unexamined in museum basements; and 2) little if any data gathered from their study are shared with the descendants. According to Suzan Shown Harjo, executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, the only bit of information the Smithsonian ever imparted to her group was that their ancestors ate corn. "We could have told them that anyway," says Harjo, citing the accuracy of Indian oral tradition.

Returning Indian remains to the proper heirs is not always easy. What contemporary group, asks David Hurst Thomas of New York City's American Museum of Natural History, can speak for a tribe that no longer exists? "If we find things from 10,000 years ago," he says, "it becomes tricky." Another potential problem: misidentified remains of one tribe might be returned to descendants of a group that was historically its mortal enemy. Beyond that, scholars note, tribes varied widely in their treatment of the dead; for some, the spirit left the remains, while for others, the spirit is still with the bones.

Nevertheless, common sense argues for wider acceptance of the Smithsonian's accord, even at the risk of some loss to scholarship. As Harjo notes, the agreement applies "modern standards of ethics to yesterday's abuses." And it may help forestall the future desecration of lands that others hold sacred in memory.

With reporting by Janice M. Horowitz/New York and Seema Paul/Washington