For centuries, Europeans carved out the prairie to suit their own idea of settlement, unearthing the graves of Native Americans as they conquered lands and pushed tribes west.
Now Native Americans whose remains were kept for research in sterile, nondescript boxes on shelves in educational institutions or on display at cultural sites are hoping that a new law in Illinois will speed their recovery so they can be properly reburied in their homelands.
“I always feel a little uneasy because I know if I go to a university or a museum … there’s a pretty good chance that there are ancestors in a basement or in a closet somewhere,” he said. Raphael Wahwassuck, tribal conservation officer for the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation in Mayetta, Kansas. “I hope this (law) will help address those concerns, knowing that we are working to correct that and take care of our ancestors to give them a proper resting place.”
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker last month signed the Human Remains Protection Act, which updates a rudimentary 1989 state statute. It also complements a federal law passed a year later, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. It requires the return of human remains and funerary, sacred and cultural objects excavated over the past 200 years by plows and bulldozers, by archaeologists or by profit-seeking plunderers to the associated tribe.
Key to the measure is that, for the first time, tribes will be allowed to rebury the remains found in Illinois, which they much prefer to do rather than send them back to states where the U.S. government sent them nearly two centuries ago. forced relocation.
The Illinois State Museum, which holds the remains of about 7,000 individuals, is prepared to reunite 1,100 of them with their tribes, said Brooke Morgan, the museum’s curator of anthropology. In total, Illinois facilities can identify nearly 13,000 individuals in need of repatriation.
What the soil produced often ended up in scientific institutions across the state, from Chicago’s Field Museum to Southern Illinois University, as well as the state museum.
Illinois is the nation’s fifth-largest repository of human remains, according to the National Park Service, which manages the repatriation program. And large numbers of remains recovered from Illinois are being held by institutions in other states. Nationally, the remains of nearly 209,000 individuals have been reported to the federal government and must be turned over to their descendants.
Information about past cultures and lives gleaned from anthropologists’ research on the remains is not without merit, Ms. Morgan said, but research must be “ethically informed.”
“While there is much to be learned, this is not without consequences or outcomes that could be detrimental to modern communities,” Ms Morgan said.
The law also increases monetary penalties, including required restitution, for disturbing human remains and objects buried with them or for exhibits — something the Illinois State Museum did at Dickson Mounds in Lewistown, 200 miles southwest of Chicago, before it was closed in 1992.
While repatriation in Illinois was slow during the first three decades of federal law, the late Cinnamon Catlin-Legutko, the museum’s director, at best in 2020 pushed her staff to gauge Native American tribes’ interest in repatriating of the Dickson Mounds property.
Now the museum is about to return the remains of 1,100 individuals from Dickson Mounds to 10 tribes whose ancestors were laid to rest there, Ms. Morgan said. The process has built stronger relationships with affected tribes, which could be critical because the new state law requires consultation — meaningful dialogue between holdings and tribes about handling and transferring remains — rather than simple notification.
“It can be emotionally taxing. It can be very traumatic to hear how their ancestors were researched, how they were housed or how they were or were not cared for,” Ms Morgan said.
What scholars now call a period of ethnic cleansing began with President Andrew Jackson’s signing of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which forced Native people to move west of the Mississippi River, creating the eastern United States cleared for white settlers, especially for the expansion of cotton cultivation in India. South.
Before the new law, “repatriation” meant transferring remains to tribes who had little choice but to return them to the states to which they had been forcibly removed.
“The tribes I talked to — one in particular the Cherokee of Oklahoma — said this is like recreating the Trail of Tears,” said the legislation’s sponsor, Rep. Mark Walker, a Democrat from the Arlington Heights suburb of Chicago. He was referring to the western death march of 1838-1839, which claimed the lives of 4,000 Cherokee.
Mr. Walker said the Cherokee told him, “Our ancestors were buried where our ancestors wanted to be buried. And now you’ve dug up their bones and you’re going to take them to where we needed to go.”
Mr Walker said negotiators have put together a list of 30 possible burial sites. Tribes will ultimately choose which sites will be used.
Matthew Bussler, historic preservation officer for the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi in Dowagiac, Michigan, said the practice and ceremony of the last rites varies by tribe. Overall, he said, it is crucial to ensure that ancestors are returned “to the womb of Mother Earth,” not only so that they can continue their journey in the afterlife, but also to “reduce all the pain and suffering to rid them of their tribe’. especially their descendants.
There are of course costs associated with repatriation, both for the tribes and for the state. The law provides money for travel and other expenses incurred by the tribes. The bill is funded in part by fines for cemetery desecration, including for the first time restitution for the collection, cleaning and reburial of illegally taken remains, just as other remains had been done for centuries before them.
“Those human remains were never treated as human beings…,” Mr. Bussler said. “Those who have been dead for hundreds of years and have just been found, or your grandmother who has just passed away – we must treat them all with the utmost respect.”
This story was reported by The Associated Press.