Nelda Goodman, a Menominee tribal elder, remembers when her white friend, Miriam Horneff, bought a ceremonial Big Drum on eBay from a former Boy Scout leader.
The drum belonged to the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. Horneff wanted to return the drum to its original owners, so, with her will executors, she met with Alton “Sonny” Smart of the related Lac du Flambeau Chippewa tribe.
Smart is a traditional helper — or “skapaewes” in Menominee — who can be given the cultural authority from Bad River elders to transport it back to its Wisconsin reservation.
After Horneff died, Smart covered the drum with a blanket and returned it with a private ceremony. However, Goodman said Horneff had a deep fascination with cultural artifacts, and her estate sold off much of her collection, which included other Native objects that were not repatriated with such care.
The pursuit of getting back sacred items is not unfamiliar to the Native American community, who consistently had their items stolen, exchanged and mishandled to end up as display pieces.
Goodman said she has seen a gamut of Native items at museums that were well maintained, but not collected in ways that felt ethical to her.
“They kind of, like, dusted off a lot of the dirt,” Goodman said with a chuckle. “But you can tell that they’ve been in a grave.”
Now, museums and institutions across the United States, including the University of Minnesota’s Weisman Art Museum, are working on repatriation, which means to return belongings to their original owners or locations. However, Indigenous communities are concerned about potential budget cuts to repatriation efforts, the financial hardship of tribes engaged in repatriation and the proper treatment of items remaining in museums and private collections.
The Weisman and NAGPRA
Until the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, passed in 1990, museums stored millions of cultural objects, religious items and even human remains in their displays or as part of private collections.
In 2022, three decades after NAGPRA passed, Weisman finally began to inventory their Native artifact collection to repatriate items from the Mimbres cultural region in Arizona, New Mexico and northern Mexico belonging to Pueblo tribes such as the Hopi people.
The museum hosted a November 2023 roundtable to discuss returning cultural artifacts, institutional accountability and steps to acknowledge historical and ongoing harms against Native communities.
At the roundtable, Kat Hayes, an anthropology professor at the University of Minnesota who specializes in archaeological ethics and repatriation, said the University must understand its role in misappropriating Native artifacts and ancestors.
“We can all acknowledge that both researchers and the institution benefited from these extractive practices,” Hayes said.
The University has since fulfilled NAGPRA requirements and legally transferred control of all Mimbres items to their Pueblo tribes. Currently, the institution is working with the tribes to physically return funerary objects.
Dylan Goestch, the University’s NAGPRA coordinator, said the University is directly consulting with the tribes to respectfully complete the return process.
“I hope that it sets a template for future repatriations that the university might make,” Goestch said.
Weisman spokesperson Susannah Schouweiler said in an emailed statement that any new information will not be issued to the public until the return process finishes.
“It’s not about trying to keep anything secret; it really is about giving the tribes the space and privacy to do the work, internal to their communities, out of the public eye,” Schouweiler said.
Why NAGPRA?
According to Hayes, NAGPRA is the most thorough act to issue a proper timeline for returning artifacts and remains to the Native community. Previous efforts, such as the Antiquities Act of 1906, started to protect Indigenous burial sites and graves from rampant looting, but it was incomplete.
Hayes, who teaches a class on NAGPRA, said the Antiquities Act served to protect the interests of the archaeological community rather than the Native American people whose belongings and remains were treated like a public resource.
“When you turn archaeological resources into a public good and make it, you know, so-called ‘belong to everybody,’ you’re still taking it away from those who are most culturally affiliated with it and ancestrally affiliated with it,” Hayes said.
Hayes said NAGPRA better protects the Indigenous community from consistent human rights violations.
A 2023 Interior Department rule set new regulations for NAGPRA requiring museums to receive tribal permission via “free, prior and informed consent” before displaying, accessing or researching cultural items and remains.
Goesetch said NAGPRA also requires proper handling of items and human remains while in museum possession.
“That often includes how are these items going to be stored? Are they going to be stored in our cedar box? Are they going to be wrapped in red felt? Are they going to be stored with traditional medicines?” Goesetch said.
What is Missing
According to a National Parks Service 2024 fiscal report, over 3.6 million associated funerary objects reported since 1990 have fully completed their repatriation process, as well as over half the human remains first identified since NAGPRA’s 1990 enactment.
The process is still incomplete for over 700,000 associated funerary objects and 90,000 human remains.
Hayes said another obstacle to repatriation for museums is an inability to dedicate proper time, staff and resources to the process.
“They’ve had over 30 years to figure out how to make this work, and so if they didn’t put the money aside from this before, they have to find the resources now,” Hayes said.
The 2023 rule also removed the option to transfer unclaimed remains or cultural items to tribes without federal recognition, even if they have a shared social identity to a recognized group.
Goetsch said unrecognized tribes, or those only recognized on a state level, like over 55 tribes in California, instead need to collaborate with another federal tribe to repatriate their objects and ancestors.
While Native Hawaiian organizations are clearly stipulated in NAGPRA, Goetsch said Pacific Islanders from territories occupied by the United States, such as Guam, are not covered by the act either.
Brian Vallo, former governor of the Pueblo of Acoma in New Mexico, said Republican president Donald Trump’s proposal to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, alongside the Smithsonian’s adherence to anti-diversity, equity and inclusion executive orders, threatens staff and resources that could focus on repatriation.
“It’s a huge step backwards,” Vallo said.
While tribes can apply for NAGPRA grants to offset the costs of repatriation, Vallo said tribes face financial hurdles that slow down the return of items and ancestors.
“We still have to pay our tribal employees, our tribal experts. We have to pay our attorneys,” Vallo said. “Sometimes it doesn’t happen or the result is really left to be unseen because of, again, just the dynamics of each individual repatriation.”
Museums and Indigenous Voices
Goestch, who is of Dakota descent, said he appreciates museums displaying Native artifacts and art for teaching young people about Indigenous history and culture, namely that of the Dakota and Ojibwe in Minnesota.
Goestch said it is important that museums communicate with tribes in order to accurately describe Native culture to an audience.
“They’re completely misinformed or misguided simply because they had never talked to the tribe that’s affiliated with those artifacts,” Goestch said. “And so you get a very misunderstanding that then gets passed down through academia and books.”
Goesetch said curators need to consider the people affected by Indigenous grave robbery. It is also harmful when archaeologists perpetuate a narrative that certain artifacts and remains were not, or could not be, of Native origin.
“It’s dehumanizing for a lot of reasons, because a lot of this was done without consultation or consent. And these burials are not always ancient,” Goesetch said. “You directly know who the descendants are to this day.”
Vallo, who now works as an independent museum consultant, said at the 2023 roundtable that tribal museums curated by Indigenous people are able to document their history in a way that advances the authentic understanding of their people and culture.
Jaylen Strong, director of the Bois Forte Heritage Center and Cultural Museum in St. Louis County, which is owned and operated by the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa, said curating a collection with Indigenous communities helps prevent misrepresenting which objects belonged to which tribes.
Strong, his band’s tribal historic preservation officer, said those outside the Native community can underestimate the generational significance of items like cradleboards, which are passed down through generations rather than discarded after a singular use.
Vallo said in an interview that tribal museums don’t treat the storage and display of material culture as a business and recognize cultural items’ role in everyday life. Tribal museums also maintain gallery spaces for Indigenous artists, theaters, classrooms and research libraries to help tribes preserve their history.
Taylor Fairbanks, a university student from the White Earth Nation and the Ho-Chunk Nation, currently interns for the Native American Initiatives Department at the Minnesota Historical Society. She said the tribal museum of the Mille Lacs Trading Post showed her the value of treating sacred items as relatives in the museum field.
Fairbanks, who also interns at the University’s Circle of Indigenous Nations, an Indigenous-run student support office, said museum visits as a child that properly represented her culture also influenced her aspiration to improve the field.
“Just seeing my younger self in those spaces really influenced and really enlightened the passion within myself to pursue history, to pursue museum work,” Fairbanks said. “I just want to continue that work for the younger generations ahead.”
Fairbanks said elders in her community have a unique cultural influence and knowledge when consulted on displays of Indigenous history and culture.
Goodman, who recently celebrated her 81st birthday, said the continued availability of Indigenous elders who can properly create an account of their history concerns her.
“A lot of work needs to be recorded,” Goodman said.
Hayes said museum collaboration with Native people on display pieces should come after consulting the original owners on possession of significant items.
“It’s one thing to say, you know, we’d like to invite you to work with us on the display of these items. It’s another thing to say, ‘And by the way, should we even have these in the first place?’” Hayes said.
Goodman said she thinks museums and institutions should financially support tribes to store and repatriate their objects. Anthropologists and curators have already built careers from her history, many without consent from those who lived that history.