Two decades ago, an anthropology professor at the University of Utah asked the National Science Foundation to fund research on Native American ancestors to determine when the cultivations of crops like corn first became prevalent in their cultures.
The studies, according to the research proposals, would involve analyzing Ancestral Pueblo remains that museums had excavated around 1900 from some of the Southwest’s most sacred sites: a deep rift that winds through Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, an ancient village near cliff dwellings in Colorado and the remnants of a settlement at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico that dates back more than a thousand years. Nearly all of the remains were held at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
The analysis would destroy portions of the ancestral remains but yield valuable information, including a more precise date of when the individuals lived, Joan Brenner Coltrain, the Utah professor, said in the research proposals. This information could help the institutions finally return the remains to descendant tribes, she said at the time.
The NSF provided $222,218 under two grants for research that spanned eight years, starting in 2002. But the studies never resulted in Harvard or the AMNH repatriating human remains to any of the tribes that trace their ancestry to sites studied by Brenner Coltrain, including the Pueblo tribes of New Mexico and the Hopi in Arizona.
Instead, the work inspired even more destructive research on ancestral remains by other scientists supported by federal funding and done without the consent of tribes, many of which view such studies as a violation of their traditions and beliefs.
“There’s somehow this perspective that this kind of research will enhance us or benefit us,” said Theresa Pasqual, director of the historic preservation office for the Pueblo of Acoma. “What it does is it bolsters their careers; it bolsters their professional, academic standing. Let’s be real about it.”
In 1990, Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, anticipating that within a decade federally funded museums and universities would return tens of thousands of ancestral remains and burial items. But as ProPublica reported this year, U.S. museums continue to hold the remains of more than 100,000 Native American ancestors, almost all of which they say are “culturally unidentifiable,” meaning they are unable to determine which tribe, if any, can rightfully claim them.
ProPublica found that by funding scientific studies on Native American human remains, the NSF and other federal agencies have created incentives for institutions to hold on to ancestors in ways that undermine the goals of NAGPRA. Federal agencies have awarded at least $15 million to universities and museums for such research since the law’s passage, a ProPublica review found.