How 2 Utah museums are working to present Native artifacts in a ‘respectful and welcoming way’

A recent change to federal regulations has the Natural History Museum of Utah — and institutions around the country — focusing anew on returning the Native American ancestors they hold to tribes.

The update to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) also is shining a light on cultural consent and collaboration between museums and different groups of people.

For example, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, senior curator Alisa McCusker said, has for the last two years increased its consultations with advisory groups when developing programming.

One example is the exhibit on the art of Polynesian tattooing from last year. The advisory council for that exhibition helped facilitate the layout of the exhibit, and made sure the images in it were presented in an honorable way.

UMFA has more than 200 works by Native people of North America in its collection, McCusker said — and, as far as she knows, UMFA has never repatriated any works, and nothing in its collection would fall under NAGPRA rules.

Right now, UMFA has two works on view by Indigenous artists, by photographer Russel Albert Daniels and by artist Gilmore Scott. Both are recent purchases, she said, and “a deliberate attempt to broaden representation within our collection of Native Voices.”

UMFA isn’t interested in purchasing historical works, McCusker said, because the museum can’t be sure how those items have been acquired.

“What we can do to broaden representation is to acquire work by contemporary artists, where we can speak with the artists, learn from them and pay them directly for their work,” McCusker said.

Daniels said he was comfortable working with UMFA because he has seen their commitment to Native communities. The museum acquired two of his color aerial landscape photographs, which depict the mega-drought in Utah and the West. He also gave a talk at the museum in January about his ancestral ties, how he grew up and how that influences his life and work.

Daniels said he is honored to be represented at the museum, and thinks that museums are still a good educational tool, as long as they proceed with consent and cultural consultation.

“Our country or culture wants to hide from our past, because it’s a horrible past,” he said. “For us to move forward, to get over these issues and to heal collectively, it starts with talking about the past — what this country and the European settlers, including Mormons and European settlers, have done to the Native people.”

How museums are responding

The update to NAGPRA “opens up an opportunity for us to return the ancestors home that we didn’t have before”, said Alex Greenwald, the curator of ethnography at NHMU and an assistant anthropology professor at the University of Utah.

In December, the Biden administration updated the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) — a revision designed to speed up the return of Native American human remains and funerary, sacred or culturally important objects to Indigenous groups.

The new regulations, Greenwald said, “will now allow us to repatriate based on geography, rather than cultural affiliation,” which had been a “pretty high bar.”

The update is meant to “streamline” the repatriation process and strengthen the role of Indigenous communities as institutions make those decisions, said Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to hold a U.S. cabinet position.

Decades after NAGPRA became law back in 1990, ProPublica found, more than 110,000 Native American, Native Hawaiian and Alaska Natives’ ancestors are still held by museums, universities and federal agencies.

There are 416 ancestral remains at NHMU that have not been made available for repatriation, according to ProPublica’s database, the largest number at an in-state institution in Utah. Many of these ancestors were found in Utah, though nearly 100 do not have location information and a dozen are from surrounding states, according to federal data compiled by the nonprofit.

NHMU said 168 of those ancestors are being held for federal agencies, and it has “decision authority” over the other 248 ancestors.

The museum is the 42nd largest number of unrepatriated Native American ancestral remains in the country, according to an investigation by ProPublica, out of roughly 600 federally funded institutions that have reported having such human remains to the Department of the Interior.

Nationwide, museums are adapting, resetting and, in some cases, scrapping entire exhibits as they navigate the new NAGPRA updates. NHMU, as it notes in signage, “doesn’t exhibit human remains or objects associated with burials,” and hasn’t removed any items from exhibits.

NHMU has, Greenwald estimated, “just shy of a million” items that are culturally affiliated with Indigenous people in North America and other places. The museum does not purchase items for its collections, aside from commissioned pieces from Indigenous artists at their art market.

And Greenwald said the museum asks for extensive paperwork from donors to prove that items are collected in a “legal and ethical manner.” She noted that Indigenous artists often use tags for their artwork; dreamcatchers for sale in the museum’s gift shop have such tags.

Offering a recent example of consent and collaboration, Greenwald described NHMU’s “Native Voices” initiative, a federally funded effort that features more than 150 hours of consultation with 14 different tribes, including the eight tribes recognized by the state of Utah. The project highlights cultural artifacts, stories, traditions and people from the tribes.

While creating its exhibit, Greenwald said, museum curators learned details from the Indigenous Advisory Council that they might otherwise have overlooked, such as the importance of putting it on the ground floor or placing it in a circular space. For example, when visitors cross over a seam that separates it from the rest of the museum, Native voices and languages greet them.

Discussions of repatriation extend to other forms, too, like decolonizing of museums — expanding viewpoints beyond just one dominant culture, namely that of white Europeans. Such moves, McCusker at UMFA said, are signs that museums are changing along with their audiences, and “that’s a good thing.”

“If we really want to be the bearers of humanity — that museums have been allotted to be since their original idea,” McCusker said, “then we really, truly need to represent in a respectful and welcoming way all of the people that we are representing.”