Tribes seek faster repatriation of their ancestors' remains

[walksalone11]

August 30, 2010

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      http://www.argusleader.com/article/20100830/NEWS/8300314

WASHINGTON - Amid the broken treaties, confiscated lands and other injustices that Native Americans have endured at the hands of white people, few are as personal as the removal of their buried ancestors.

For a culture that assigns special meaning to burial rites, it's been painful, Native Americans say, knowing that the remains of tens of thousands of their ancestors have been unearthed, carted off and kept in various federal agencies, museums and other institutions - and not being able to do much about it.

"Symbolically, there's not much worse than having your relatives packed up and stored away as if they're no longer a human being, as if that person never existed," said D. Bambi Kraus, president of the National Association of Tribal Historic Preservation Officers. "These people had names. They were part of complex cultures and societies that existed thousands of years before and have been somehow objectified into just a number on a shelf."

Kraus and others hope that recent developments will help speed up repatriation of human bones and the sacred funerary objects, such as tools, pottery shards and clothing, to the tribes that buried them. The remains of more than 160,000 Native Americans are kept at federal agencies and museums that receive public funding, according to the National Park Service. That service maintains databases as a result of the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

Diane Derossier, the historic preservation officer for the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate Tribe in South Dakota, said the tribe has repatriated the remains of more than 1,000 members since the law took effect 20 years ago. But not everyone is ready to part with their collections, she said.

"We've met with resistance," she said. "They use them for study, and it's just like, 'Well, would you want us to study your great-grandparents and keep them on a shelf?' That's just wrong. In our belief, they're not at rest. They need to be taken care of with appropriate ceremony and reburied."