James W. Bradley, a former director of the Andover, Massachusetts, museum now known as the Robert S. Peabody Institute of Archaeology, said in a NAGPRA training video: “We basically didn’t know what we had, and we had pretty good catalog control. But intellectual control — knowing what it was, making it available — we really didn’t know.” The law forced the museum “to do what we just had never gotten around to doing, which is to clean up our mess, find out what we had collected, what we had excavated,” he said.
For human remains, the law mandated a detailed accounting, including where they had been excavated and which present-day Indigenous communities might rightfully claim them. Lawmakers had initially wanted a similar item-by-item inventory of cultural items and sacred objects — which could include items like those taken from Wounded Knee, according to Congressional testimony. But such a requirement was seen as too onerous and expensive, so museums’ initial notices about objects sometimes mentioned only who had donated the item. Many would require additional research to decipher.
“When these summaries reached tribal nations, there was not enough information about the origins of the objects, or the way in which the objects were cataloged, or even what the objects specifically were to enable people in those nations to know how to start reclaiming it,” said Margaret Bruchac, a University of Pennsylvania anthropology professor emerita who has worked as a repatriation consultant to museums and tribes.
Bruchac said “tribal nations did not have inside knowledge of museum cataloging systems, and museums did not have sufficient cultural knowledge about tribal materials. So it’s as though they were speaking entirely separate languages.”
The burden of researching the origin of the objects, some of them hundreds of years old, fell to tribal communities, White Plume said. If there’s a record that an object was from the Oglala Lakota, it should be given back without hesitation, he said, “yet they’re sitting there waiting for us to describe in detail the item that we want back.”
Among the notifications the AMNH sent to the Oglala Lakota was one, dated Nov. 16, 1993, listing hundreds of objects in such broad categories as “dress and adornment,” “ritual and recreation” and “unspecified/unknown.” Among them were the four relics from Wounded Knee.
Despite guidance from the National Park Service, which oversees the NAGPRA program, that museums reveal how they acquired the objects, the AMNH offered only two clues about their origin. In an entry classified as “dress and adornment,” it mentioned “Sioux: Bigfoot’s band” and the donor’s name, Edgar Mearns.