We had reached the top of a sandstone mesa when Theresa Pasqual set down her hiking pole and scanned the storied canyon before us.
We could see the centuries-old buildings of Chaco Canyon, a site in northwest New Mexico that her tribe’s ancestors, the Ancestral Puebloans, had occupied before eventually establishing other communities in the region. Pueblo Bonito, the canyon’s largest structure, sprawled from near the base of the bluff where we stood, its walls arcing around hundreds of hollowed rooms.
Two colleagues and I had traveled to the canyon with Pasqual as part of our reporting on how the nation’s most prestigious museums and universities had excavated Native American cultural sites like this and how they continued to keep what they took.
Pasqual, who is from the Pueblo of Acoma, roughly 100 miles to the south, has visited this remote canyon countless times, starting some four decades ago as a child on trips with her father. Now, she is the director of the Acoma Historic Preservation Office.
She describes Chaco Canyon as a place to which Acoma people make pilgrimages. It is a sacred site, and multiple tribes trace their ancestry to it. It is also incomplete, void of the thousands of items and hundreds of ancestral remains that museums took during excavations that began in the late 1800s, she said.
“It’s like a looted palace somewhere in some other country,” said Pasqual. “What we see in Chaco now is really only the shell of what was once here.”
I first met Pasqual several months earlier as my colleagues and I began investigating why many museums have been slow to return human remains, burial items and sacred objects to tribes.
I had struggled to decide whether to report on the topic. As an Apsáalooke, or member of the Crow Tribe in Montana, I know how sensitive discussions of museum holdings and matters of repatriation can be for a tribal community. Where I grew up, museums had collected ancestors and precious objects, sometimes through exploitative purchases and sometimes through outright grave robbing. Contemplating this history as an Indigenous person can feel disturbing and dehumanizing.
How could I write about this issue, I often asked myself. But how could I not, given that it has lingered far longer than Congress intended when it passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990.