Gilbert Little Wolf honors the remains of one of the children shot at Fort Robinson in 1878. The tribe buried a teddy bear with her. 1993 photo by John Warner

Cultural property rights is a relatively new term. It encompasses sacred and ceremonial items such as masks, medicine bundles, and ceremonial shields. It also refers to less tangible properties, such as songs, stories, and ceremonies. In 1990, Congress passed a significant law bringing cultural property rights to the nation’s attention: the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). This issue of the Tribal College Journal focuses upon two of the next steps necessary after NAGPRA to resolve the deep  differences between two cultures about research and knowledge: 1) enacting tribal restrictions on cultural research and 2) building tribal museums and tribal capacity for safeguarding cultural heritage.

I was introduced to cultural property rights and to tribal sensitivity to outside researchers many years ago in Lame Deer, Montana. I was reminded of this recently at the Native Research and Scholarship Symposium on Orcas Island, Washington, in July 1996 (see “Dear Readers” on page 3). At the symposium Jennie Seminole Parker mentioned a moratorium imposed by her tribe, the Northern Cheyenne, in 1973 on cultural research.

It so happened that in June 1974, I had accompanied a retired school teacher, Ida Ferrin, to the Northern Cheyenne Reservation as her driver. I had never visited a reservation community before. She had taught on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming and written a book of “legends,” and she wanted to research Cheyenne stories. An energetic, impulsive woman in her 70s, Ida was intensely interested in the world around her, particularly in the underdog, she told me. “Teaching Indian children is like asking them to eat poison unless you adapt to their culture,” she said. When asked at a garden club lecture why Indians don’t want to learn, she said, “How would you feel if the Soviets came in and said we’re going to study Catherine the Great for a month so you can appreciate her?” Her sentiments seemed compassionate and proper to me.

When we arrived in Lame Deer, however, we encountered the moratorium. Over the next several days, we met with various cultural liaisons, including Joe Little Coyote, who kept the door politely but firmly shut to her research. Little Coyote explained that Hyemeyohsts “Chuck” Storm had published a book, Seven Arrows, containing private cultural information, deeply offending the tribe’s traditional warrior societies. The book by Storm, a Cheyenne tribal member, became a best seller amongst non-Indians in the counter-culture, but it violated tribal protocol. Little Coyote told us that various authors had misused, sensationalized, and falsified cultural information, confusing Cheyenne young people and the public at large. Marxism and environmentalism were being passed off as Cheyenne. Missionaries were using the culture to sell their own brands of religion, Little Coyote said.

Ironically, tribal elected officials were willing to talk to me (and other journalists) about another matter: the coal leases they were fighting. So instead of collecting information about a cultural subject, Ida accompanied me on interviews about the Cheyennes’ government and its self-determination efforts.

Secrecy and survival

Many people like Ida Ferrin sincerely don’t understand why anyone would object to their efforts to learn about another culture. But as Mary Weasel Fat explains in her article about the Blood Tribe in Alberta, Canada, tribal traditions require strict protocols that even the most well meaning and informed people can unknowingly violate without guidance. Museum curators, for example, have neglected the spiritual care for objects in their collections, arousing feelings in Sacred Horn Society members similar to feelings of child neglect.

Secrecy has been critical to the survival of their traditions, Weasel Fat points out. When governments prohibited indigenous people to dance, hold potlatch ceremonies, or speak their language, the practices went underground and thus endured.    Suspicions about researchers have a long history. Over the past two centuries, collectors have accumulated baskets, quillwork, and human skulls to save remnants of what they perceived as a dying culture. Missionaries and school teachers collected tribal stories, families’ songs, and language tapes, just as my friend Ida Ferrin attempted to do.

Many decades ago the need for protection sometimes overrode the need for privacy, and some tribes entrusted their sacred objects to museums so they would be preserved. They feared the loss of their cultures due to government prohibitions, to shame, and to their own members selling communally owned ceremonial objects.

Collectors often contributed to the loss of culture as they carted away tribal heritage. I remember an Apache archeologist’s horror when he learned his grandfather had been decapitated in an American jail so the skull could be sent to the Smithsonian Institution’s skull collection. When the Smithsonian announced its search for a full series of American Indian skulls in 1863, it said the skulls were to be procured “without offense to the living,” but the Indian people had reason to believe otherwise. Before long, there seemed to be more boxes of human remains in museums than there were live Indians.

Outsiders often profited at tribal communities’ expense. The George Heye collection–now part of the National Museum of the American Indian–included 450 items that had been confiscated in 1921 at a large potlatch in the Northwest and subsequently purchased by Heye. The local Indian agent arrested 29 Indians at the potlatch and demanded that they surrender all masks, headdresses, blankets, etc. While mainstream society disdained the “pagan” rites, someone evidently valued the distasteful properties. In more recent times, researchers have gone to reservation communities with their own agendas to ask tribal members about their most private religious and sexual practices.

Funerary remains of 26 Northern Cheyenne men, women, and children make the final journey home as the result of repatriation. 1993 photo by John Warner.

Some research has brought significant benefits to tribal communities, of course. The Merriam Report that led to the Indian Reorganization Act in 1934 is just one example. In many cases, tribes have requested research to address particular issues. Nevertheless, “research” is a dirty word in most Indian communities, according to Mary Belgarde (Isleta Pueblo) of the University of New Mexico, who spoke at a conference on Native American higher education sponsored by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation recently. Years of intrusive, insensitive research has led to a generalized distrust of anthropology, archaeology, and museums.

When Congress passed the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990, it took a significant step toward healing old wounds. Photographs by John Warner in this issue convey the deep emotions when the remains of 26 men, women, and children were returned and buried on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana. The repatriation occurred in October 1993, more than a century after the people had been captured and killed as they attempted to escape their exile in Oklahoma. Their remains went to the Smithsonian Institution and the Peabody Museum at Harvard. As one tribal member expressed it, the bones had spent 118 years in captivity and finally had come home. With the burial of their people, the Cheyenne could wipe their tears.

Cultural survival

In this issue, articles by James Nason and Carolyn Casey outline the next steps toward building understanding and alliances around cultural property rights. Nason provides a thoughtful, even-handed approach to tribal restrictions on research within their communities. As a scholar and a museum curator, he understands the Western heritage of scientific freedom. As a Comanche who has worked with Native groups around the world, he understands the Native perspective.

Some repatriated objects won’t go into museums. They will become center pieces for ceremonies again. Nevertheless, many tribes need safe places to display and interpret a wide array of cultural items. Experts predict in the next five years the number of tribal museums will double, as pointed out in the article by Carolyn Casey. Some people are concerned about this trend, questioning whether tribes can be good stewards of important cultural artifacts. The skeptics include some American Indian museum professionals familiar with the uncertainties of tribal politics and tribal projects’ funding.

“They’re looking at it from the European perspective–that we are saving the culture for them,” says Harry Walters, director of Navajo Community College’s Hatathli Museum. Despite several changes in administration at the college, Walters has been museum director for 20 years. Each administration has supported the museum, and it has also been protected by the infrastructure approved by the NCC Board of Regents many years ago, he says. At the beginning, Walters studied the structure of other university museums and adapted them to Navajo Community College.

To do their job as cultural stewards right, the tribes depend upon their own cultural leaders who take their responsibilities very personally and who have the benefit of thousands of years of education on their roles. They also depend upon others for financial and technical assistance–people such as James Nason of the Burke Museum, Elizabeth Sackler of the American Indian Ritual Object Repatriation Foundation, and Gail Bruce of the American Indian Field Museums; as well as institutions such as the Smithsonian, the Institute of Museum Services, and individual museums.

Through the American Indian Field Museum project described in this issue, more tribal colleges will be building museums next year. As institutes of higher learning, tribal colleges will play key roles in resolving cultural property rights issues. By studying outside institutions and other tribal museums, they can build infrastructures for enduring institutions to weather political storms. They can facilitate training for tribal museum staffs. They can provide leadership for tribal research guidelines.

As tribes assume more responsibility for their cultural property rights, mistakes will no doubt be made and false steps taken. Yet the threats today do not compare with the dangers of the past when nearly everyone–Natives and non-Natives–believed the people and their cultures were doomed. Despite the best efforts of federal governments and mainstream society over the last 500 years, many cultures survived. They survived due to the tenacity, the spiritual strength, and the skills of the Native people.

For further reading, see the Resource Guide elsewhere in this issue. Also see “Reflections of a Native Repatriator” by Richard Hill, Sr., in Mending the Circle: A Native American Repatriation Guide published by the American Indian Ritual Object Repatriation Foundation.