Grand Forks, North Dakota — Last month, tribal leaders arrived at the University of North Dakota on a solemn secret mission.
For three days they cleaned storage rooms, recited prayers, and carried boxes. I had to make sure the alarm didn’t go off.
This was the first step in a long process of returning artifacts and Native American remains from the university to the tribe.
More than 30 years ago, Congress passed a law requiring universities and museums to return Indigenous sites and artefacts. But after a generation, the regression is slow and pausing. Many institutions have protracted the process, questioning the tribe’s ties to the artifact, and in some cases arguing over whether the item should be returned. It doesn’t seem to make a comprehensive effort to find and return it, leaving us wondering how decades have passed without progress.
“Somebody must have opened the box, looked at something, looked at it, and walked away,” said Crystal Alberts, an English professor at the University of North Dakota. March.
This process is particularly painful and personal on the North Dakota campus because of the school’s demographics and past. It has a center for American Indians and a full academic program for Native students pursuing careers in medicine, psychology, and nursing. However, the university’s history includes a long-running dispute over its former mascot, Fighting Sue.
“UND has set standards that desecrate, disrespect and stigmatize indigenous peoples,” said Hilary Kempenich, a college graduate who is a member of Turtle Mountain Anisina Abe. 20 years ago. “They may give us back the remains, but they have a greater responsibility to help us heal and move forward.”
North Dakota is one of many universities working on these issues. For much of the 20th century, many academic institutions in the country considered collecting Aboriginal artifacts and sites a legitimate purpose, and archaeologists excavated burial grounds for study and display. Harvard University, University of California, Berkeley, and University of Alabama are among the schools that have faced criticism in recent years for how they handle the return of remains and artifacts. According to the National Park Service, more than 108,000 Indigenous bodies and more than 765,000 artifacts are known to be held by museums, universities and federal agencies.
Late last month, North Dakota campus officials announced that they had found remains and artifacts this year. Guided by the wishes of their tribal leaders, they promised to return what had been looted long ago. But they are only at the beginning of the difficult process of determining which human remains belong to which tribe.
“The clock is ticking and we must move quickly,” said Andrew Armacost, the university’s president. “And you have to think about the trade-offs,” he added. “Will we wait until the set of ancestors and items is fully identified and marked to a specific site? Or do we split it up?”
On the well-maintained campus of Grand Forks, the announcement troubled the Native Americans. Devon Headdress, a fourth-year student of Hidatsa and aspiring doctor, said she felt deep anger at first and had trouble concentrating in class after hearing the news. Nerissa Dolny, who is pursuing a doctorate in psychology, described it as a “soul wound.”
Dorney, a member of Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, which has reservations in South Dakota and North Dakota, said:
Native students and faculty have spoken of reconciling their outrage over the university’s past misconduct, at least so far, with what is best described as a sincere effort to return the bodies. Mr. Heddress, president of the Indian Association of the United States, said his initial complaint that Dr. Armacost had waited six months to make his findings public, when the president explained that he did so at the request of the tribal leaders. , said it had calmed down. Graduate student Ele Driscoll said he expects the university to keep its promises.
“This is probably going to be something you carry around with you for the rest of your time at UND,” said Driscoll, an Iowa-based Meswaki. “It weighs on us.”
University leaders were vague about where the bodies and artifacts were found on campus, which faculty members collected and stored them, and which tribes claimed them.
Dr Armacost, who took over as president in 2020, said it was too early to know, but some university officials said most or all of the human remains belonged to people who died before the 19th century. said he believed that Some of the artifacts may have been used as teaching materials in the classroom.
Henry Montgomery, a professor and acting president in the early days of the university, whose photo is displayed in the Administration Building, was best known for excavating Native American burial mounds. In 1906, he published a paper entitled “The Prehistoric Human Remains of the Dakota.”
Until recent decades, Native American objections to the excavation of burial grounds were routinely ignored in favor of claims that bones and artifacts had academic value.
That attitude slowly evolved after intensive Native American activism to prioritize the wishes of tribal members. Commonly known as NAGPRA, the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 set standards for the recovery of remains and sacred objects by Native American tribes.
April M. Beisaw, chair of the anthropology department at Vassar College, said she and other scholars who entered the field after NAGPRA were accustomed to taking tribal wishes into consideration.
“People of my generation accept that this is the right thing to do because they don’t know a world without NAGPRA,” Dr. Beisaw said. Some old archaeologists who opposed the law. “They felt entitled to receive those collections,” she said. “They felt personally attacked.”
At Harvard University, which houses thousands of Native American remains subject to NAGPRA, officials have apologized for collecting the items and promised to return them to the appropriate tribes, but have been slow to move.
The University of California, Berkeley has begun the process of returning thousands of human bones and sacred objects, but the university has been criticized for not working closely with tribal members on repatriation.
The ruins on the University of North Dakota campus were apparently kept away from public view for a long time, unknown to the current campus leadership and undisclosed publicly. And most of the bones were not part of the complete skeleton, some were damaged. Many of them were thought to have been kept at the university since the early 20th century as a result of excavations in the cemetery by archaeologists. Such excavations continued into the 1980s, the university said.
University officials said they were unsure if there were any efforts to return the remains and artifacts when NAGPRA took effect in the 1990s. In addition to finding dozens of bodies, the university also improperly possessed headdresses, pipes and other artifacts, they said.
The return of the remains comes amid growing national awareness of other historical wrongs committed against Indigenous peoples, such as boarding schools where Indigenous students were taken against their will.
Jamie Azul, president of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, believes some of the remains and artifacts at the University of North Dakota were taken from his own tribe. “You’re almost insensitive to it, because what’s next?”
Some Native Americans at the university said they had mixed and even conflicting views about their school. Doug MacDonald, professor of psychology for more than 30 years as Oglala Lakota, said, “As much as I love this institution, I recognize the strained relationships that have existed with Native American tribes and peoples. I am.”
Dr. McDonald said he has been proud of his work training Native American psychologists for decades. However, he was continually discouraged by the controversy surrounding the Fighting Su name and logo, which are displayed prominently on car bumper stickers and outside hockey arenas, even though they were officially discontinued in 2012. rice field.
About 6% of North Dakota’s residents are Native Americans, making it the state’s largest non-white racial group, with at least a portion of five reservations lying within the state’s borders. About 3.8% of students were identified as Native American or Alaska Native, according to University of North Dakota officials.
Relations between state governments and tribes are regularly strained. When thousands of Native Americans gathered in 2016 and 2017 to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline that runs near the reservation, the National Guard and state police were called. .
Republican Governor Doug Burgham, who took office amid the pipeline protests, has worked to improve relations. In 2019, the flags of his five tribal nations in North Dakota were permanently installed in the State Capitol. He apologized to the tribe for calling the university’s handling of bodies and artifacts “extremely insensitive”.
The process that lies ahead for universities is in many ways the most difficult part. While some of the artifacts and relics contain detailed documentation, officials say little is known about the origins of others, some dating back more than 1,000 years.
There are also liability issues for both the university and the individual, and the hard truth is that knowing the full story requires speaking to current or former employees who were involved in the acquisition or storage of the remains.
Reign Lyons, director of development at the College of Arts and Sciences and member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, was part of the group that opened the first box of remains in March, and she described the experience as traumatic and shocking. said it was. When she found those bones, she was looking for artifacts stored on campus, possibly some arrowheads.
Lyons said the current focus is on ensuring accountability from the university and ensuring that ancestral remains are respectfully returned to the tribe.
“We need action beyond just words,” she said. “It hurts to know that people who aren’t here anymore can’t say anything.”
Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.