NEW YORKER: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/08/12/how-tribal-nations-are-reclaiming-oklahoma
Published in the print edition of the August 12, 2024, issue, with the headline “Promised Land.”
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Museums closed Native American exhibits 6 months ago. Tribes are still waiting to get items back
PHILIP MARCELO Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) — Tucked within the expansive Native American halls of the American Museum of Natural History is a diminutive wooden doll that holds a sacred place among the tribes whose territories once included Manhattan.
For more than six months now, the ceremonial Ohtas, or Doll Being, has been hidden from view after the museum and others nationally took dramatic steps to board up or paper over exhibits in response to new federal rules requiring institutions to return sacred or culturally significant items to tribes — or at least to obtain consent to display or study them.
Museum officials are reviewing more than 1,800 items as they work to comply with the requirements while also eyeing a broader overhaul of the more than half-century-old exhibits.
But some tribal leaders remain skeptical, saying museums have not acted swiftly enough. The new rules, after all, were prompted by years of complaints from tribes that hundreds of thousands of items that should have been returned under the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 still remain in museum custody.
“If things move slowly, then address that,” said Joe Baker, a Manhattan resident and member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians, descendants of the Lenape peoples European traders encountered more than 400 years ago. “The collections, they’re part of our story, part of our family. We need them home. We need them close.”
The leader of the tribe in Oklahoma said he visited the Peabody this year after the university reached out about returning hair clippings collected in the early 1930s from hundreds of Indigenous children, including Cherokees, forced to assimilate in the notorious Indian boarding schools.
“The fact that we’re in a position to sit down with Harvard and have a really meaningful conversation, that’s progress for the country,” he said.
As for Baker, he wants the Ohtas returned to its tribe. He said the ceremonial doll should never have been on display, especially arranged as it was among wooden bowls, spoons and other everyday items.
“It has a spirit. It’s a living being,” Baker said. “So if you think about it being hung on a wall all these years in a static case, suffocating for lack of air, it’s just horrific, really.”
This story was first published on Jul. 29, 2024. It was updated on Jul. 31, 2024, to correct the scope of repatriations to tribes undertaken by the Field Museum in Chicago.
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