Museums return Native American remains
Timothy Walsh had never seen human remains before. But as collection manager at the Bruce Museum, in Greenwich, it was his job to lay out the remains of Native American ancestors so representatives from tribal nations could view them.
By that point, in October 2019, the Bruce was already a few months into the process of returning ancestral remains to tribes under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), a federal law Congress passed in 1990 requiring museums, universities and institutions to return such remains.
But as Walsh looked at the ancestors’ remains laid out, the gravity of the task really hit him.
He had to close the doors, he said, and take a moment for himself.
“These are people,” Walsh said. “They’re fathers, mothers, grandparents, children. And they should be where they belong.”
Between 1927 and 1959, the Bruce received the remains of 18 Native ancestors from Connecticut, New York, Florida and Alabama. Many were donated after being unearthed during construction, at a time when there were few laws to protect Native graves in such situations.
But since 2019, the museum has returned all the remains to tribal nations — including 14 ancestors from Connecticut, far more than any other institution has returned from the state.
To date, five museums have returned all the ancestors from Connecticut that were in their collections, according to records and museum officials. Besides the Bruce, they’re the Barnum Museum in Bridgeport; the Spratt-Mead Museum at Bridgton Academy in Maine; and Harvard University’s Warren Anatomical Museum and the Robert S. Peabody Institute of Archaeology at Phillips Academy, both in Massachusetts.
Officials at the Bruce Museum were clear that they can’t speak to what other institutions have or haven’t done.
“It’s different for every single institution, and it’s different for every single ancestor,” Kirsten Reinhardt, the museum’s NAGPRA coordinator, said.
The process at the Bruce was slow and often painstaking, officials said. And, as Walsh’s experience shows, it was emotional work even for museum staff, much less the tribal representatives involved.
The key to success, museum officials said, was being persistent and leaning into the law’s spirit along with its letter — doing the right thing for the ancestors and their living descendants.
“It’s not about us, you know?” Walsh said. “I don’t want it to seem like, ‘Oh yeah, it’s so emotional for me.’ Think of how the tribes feel when they know that they have ancestors in these institutions.”
NAGPRA requires museums that receive federal funds to inventory the remains of Native ancestors and burial belongings in their collections. To complete that inventory, museums are supposed to consult with tribal nations that may have ties to the ancestors, with the aim of establishing a “cultural affiliation” — a link between the ancestor and a tribe or tribes based on factors like shared geography, culture, history or biology.
If all goes well, at the end of that process a notice goes in the Federal Register — the official public journal of the federal government — stating that the ancestral remains are culturally affiliated, and they can either be returned or they can stay at the museum, at least temporarily, at the tribe’s request.
The Bruce Museum thought it was in compliance with the law. It even had a 3-inch-thick binder full of records to prove it, according to Reinhardt.