Museums now required to gain consent when displaying Native American artifacts
By Jazmine Knight
Museums in St. Joseph and across the U.S. will have to reevaluate their Native American artifacts following new updates to a 1990 law.
The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act prohibits museums, schools and organizations from displaying or conducting research on anything culturally significant to Native American tribes without their consent.
While the law isn’t new, recent updates reinforce the rules for museums. To gain consent, the museum must determine what tribe each artifact originated from. From there, museum staff has to reach out to a tribe representative and explain their intentions with the artifact.
Tori Zieger, archaeologist and NAGPRA Coordinator for St. Joseph Museums, says it’s all about building relationships with these tribes.
“Building relationships with tribes, touching base with people who know their belongings more than I do, and just making sure that they are informed and that we are doing everything we can to not add on to the historic hurt that has been done before,”
The only exception to these rules are projectile points.
“Unless they came from a burial, usually those are fine to be exhibited without consultation. We still try to talk to tribes as often as we can,” Zieger said.
As far as turnaround time, it varies. Zieger says “a big time crunch is the lack of resources on the tribe.”
If it’s a situation where the museum is unsure on the origin of an artifact, extensive research is conducted.
“Sometimes there are prolific collectors from the time period and we kind of know where they were collecting from, so we can try to narrow it down some. Sometimes we can’t figure it out either,” said Zieger. “Any time I communicate with tribes, I kind of show them the stuff that we don’t know anything about and the tribal representatives can often be like, ‘Hey, that kind of looks like things we make. We’d like to consult on that.’“
Currently, the Native American exhibit of the St. Joseph Museum is closed for renovations. However, they are working to reevaluate the consent of items they will have on display.
“We do have items that are not ours and that do need to be returned. We also have items that tribes don’t mind us having. So it’s just that conversation of making sure they know what we have and that they are okay with what we have,” Zieger said. “And then organizing either a visit. Either the tribe coming here to visit, or me doing whatever I can so that they have access to our collection and can tell us those things that they want back.”
