Gilcrease Museum repatriating six sets of ancestral remains. Oklahoma has over 2,800 to go6/19/2023 Tulsa World // Investigative Article By Neal Franklin The human remains of more than 2,800 Indigenous people are housed in seven Oklahoma museums. Six of those sets of remains affiliated with the Caddo, Osage and Quapaw nations are now closer to reburial. After the origins of the remains are determined, the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act allows for tribal nations to claim them. Carrie Wilson is one of the people in Oklahoma involved in this delicate process. For the past 30 years, she’s worked for the Quapaw Tribe to reclaim the remains of its people stored in museum collections. “It’s just the right thing to do,” Wilson said. “People have really given to the argument they shouldn’t have been excavated or whatever, but it’s kind of a moot point to me. It’s just getting them back under the control of tribal people.” Laura Bryant, Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act coordinator at the Gilcrease Museum, worked to identify the remains in this latest case and contacted the appropriate tribes. The ancestors died before European people came into contact with people in North America, she said. The remains were given to Gilcrease in 1982 by Frank Soday, an avocational archeologist, according to an agenda of the Tulsa City Council. The remains soon will be reintroduced to the ground in a “keepsake cemetery” in Arkansas, Wilson said. The cemetery is where remains that are known to belong to a region but aren’t known to be members of a specific nation are buried. In 2006, the remains of 161 ancestors were returned to the Quapaw Tribe by the Gilcrease Museum as part of its first repatriation. In addition, 86 boxes of Quapaw artifacts, including pottery dating back to between 1170 and 1300 A.D., were returned. Wilson worked on that case, as well. Gilcrease Museum has about 300 sets of Indigenous remains that have not completed the processes required in the Repatriation Act, according to a National Park Service database. The museum is still identifying remains and sacred objects belonging to tribes. This month, three sacred objects and a wooden rattle were discussed for the Repatriation Act’s processes, according to an agenda of the Gilcrease Museum Board of Trustees. “The tribes that we have dealt with — the Caddo, the Osage, the Quapaw — you know, we worked with Tulsa, and I think they’ve done a good job in their repatriation process,” Wilson said. “So we work with them, and we’ve got all this through. Now we’re going to get these six individuals and rebury them back in Arkansas.” Gilcrease Museum does not display the remains of humans or funerary items, Bryant said. The museum closed its doors in 2021 to build a new building at the same site. In preparation for its reopening, the museum is consulting with Native American tribes, she said. “We have worked very closely with a number of tribes in the exhibit development process from the very beginning in determining what stories they want told, what items are culturally acceptable for display,” Bryant said. Before more remains can be repatriated, the museum has to determine their cultural affiliation. Bryant said the museum is working to identify more of the remains in its collection. “Most of the time, these ancestors and materials were previously identified as culturally unidentifiable and in older inventory,” Bryant said. “But we’re now going back through a lot of these to determine cultural affiliation, because we do have enough information to do that.” The museum then consults with the relevant tribes, she said. The process, as laid out in the Repatriation Act, then has to be approved by the city of Tulsa, which owns the Gilcrease Museum, and published in the Federal Register. Then, after 30 days, the remains can be returned to the appropriate tribe. The six latest sets of remains are waiting to be approved by a federal review committee before being put on the register. The Tulsa City Council approved the process in May. Of the sets of remains at the Gilcrease Museum, 202 are associated with a state and county but have not been returned to a tribe, according to the database. It lists the geographic origin of 104 sets of remains as unknown. These numbers could change with recent repatriations. Other remains are at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History at the University of Oklahoma, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Tulsa District, the Oklahoma Historical Society, the Oklahoma Archeological Survey at OU, the University of Tulsa Department of Anthropology and the Mabee-Gerrer Museum of Art, according to the database. Many of those remains could be returned to Native American tribes, said Shannon O’Loughlin, who served on the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act Review Committee in 2013 and is the CEO and attorney for the Association on American Indian Affairs. “Say they have 10 ancestors that have a connection to a certain county and a certain state,” O’Loughlin said. “That’s enough information to reach out to tribes to consult on those ancestors and find affiliation to repatriate.” O’Loughlin, a citizen of the Choctaw Nation, said the process is supposed to be relatively easy, because beginning the process requires only a geographical location. But O’Loughlin said some institutions are not identifying remains and therefore not repatriating them. About 100,000 sets of human remains and about 750,000 associated funerary items have been inventoried by organizations in the U.S., according to the National Park Service database. Finding the number of museums that hold Caddo remains is difficult, said Johnathan Rohrer, the historic preservation officer for the Caddo Nation. “There are so many different institutions that have Caddo collections that are still in the process of inventorying those collections,” he said. The Department of the Interior is currently revising Repatriation Act regulations that O’Loughlin said should close loopholes if approved. The regulations should be finalized by the secretary of the interior before the end of September, O’Loughlin said. Wilson said she is worried that new National Park Service policies to expedite repatriation by focusing on location instead of cultural affiliation could hurt the process. “Tribes, like myself, the Quapaw, we’re really trying to recreate our past and see where we really came from,” Wilson said. “I’m afraid it will get kind of lost in this hurried new approach that they’re trying to do.”
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AuthorI am a writer pursuing a career in Journalism who has covered topics in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the D.C. area and American University. Archives
April 2024
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