Last year, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court agreed with a lower court that had dismissed Lanier’s claim to ownership of the photos. The justices ruled in part that no legal avenue allows descendants to obtain possession of artifacts that resulted from their ancestors’ enslavement. (The court did allow her to pursue an emotional distress action in which she accuses Harvard of “publicly and cavalierly dismissing her claim of an ancestral connection to Renty and Delia.” Harvard denies this claim — and that she has proven she is a lineal descendant. That case is pending.)
As Justice Elspeth Cypher noted during oral arguments, “There are systems in place for repatriating remains for Native Americans and their objects. We unfortunately don’t have something in place through Congress to do that for African Americans and descendants.”
Cypher was referring to the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA. ProPublica has been investigating the failure of federally funded museums, including the Peabody, to repatriate their holdings of Native American remains and artifacts under the law.
Among other things, NAGPRA allows lineal descendants of Native people who owned certain objects to pursue their return. But enslaved ancestors couldn’t own property — they were the property.
And because they were treated as property, exhuming enough records to clearly connect generations of enslaved ancestors also borders on the impossible, as Lanier has discovered during her 13-year odyssey.
But more is at stake than who gets to claim “ownership,” a fraught concept in a battle over coerced pictures taken of captive people. Lanier’s ultimate goal is not to possess the images for herself but to reclaim a story. She sees revealing the brutality of the imagery, and the humanity of the subjects, as being as important to the broader understanding of the nation’s legacy of slavery as the images themselves.
“She is involved in a conversation that goes to many broader issues of African American empowerment — and disempowerment — in the telling of their own story,” said Michael Blakey, a bioarchaeologist and professor at the College of William & Mary and co-chair of The Commission for the Ethical Treatment of Human Remains of the American Anthropological Association.
Lanier’s quest is about finding a rightful steward to make decisions over the handling of the photographs and how they are presented. She has a new potential home in mind, one that she feels would finally set the people captured in them free.