Indian Time - A Voice from the Eastern Door

Dartmouth College announced recently that the Hood Museum of Art and the anthropology department uncovered the skeletal remains of 15 Native American persons while conducting a series of internal re-inventories. The skeletal remains were found in their respective collections.

In two osteological assessments conducted by college personnel, along with a continuous external examination by forensic anthropologists and archeologists, the “skeletal remains of 15 individuals identified as Native American” were discovered, according to the statement. Furthermore, 100 bones lacking a Hood Museum accession number, or catalog number, were labeled as “potentially problematic.” As stated in the anthropology records, some of the unearthed bones were utilized in human osteology teaching laboratories as recently as the fall of 2022.

Numerous shortcomings in the College’s catalog and inventory system exposed that human remains in Dartmouth’s collections originally thought to be of non-Native origin, were in fact Native American.

The College stated it is “actively pursuing” repatriation in accordance with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, a federal law requiring the return of sacred items, human remains, and other culturally significant objects to federally-recognized tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations.

“On behalf of Dartmouth, I sincerely apologize to our entire community,” President Philip J. Hanlon expressed in the College’s statement.

Additionally, Hanlon mentioned that the College will undertake measures to provide assistance to those impacted by these findings.

“In great sympathy with all of the pain that Indian Country is enduring, we at Dartmouth pledge to take careful and meaningful action to address our situation and consult with the communities most directly impacted,” Hanlon penned. “Dartmouth is dedicated to righting these heartbreaking wrongs.”

Following the enactment of NAGPRA in 1990, Dartmouth finished its first inventory of Native American holdings in 1995. The announcement highlighted that, since Dartmouth’s original inventory, the College has repatriated remains to Native and Indigenous groups on four distinct occasions.

In 2018, upon becoming the College’s NAGPRA officer, Jami Powell, Hood Museum curator of Indigenous art, started requesting a re-inventory of Dartmouth’s Native American archives. Powell mentioned in the College’s statement that initial inventories after NAGPRA’s enactment were often prone to mistakes.

“From my experience at other institutions, I knew that the initial inventories done in the 1990s, when NAGPRA was first passed, were often rushed by necessity and conducted by staff who had numerous other responsibilities in terms of collections management and care,” Powell explained.

Despite setbacks caused by renovations and the COVID-19 pandemic, the Hood concluded its re-inventory in early 2021, as stated in the College’s statement.

During the summer of 2021, the anthropology department initiated a re-inventory of its own, which resulted in identifying several bones with “ambiguous labeling and appearance,” as per the College’s statement. Some of these remains had accession numbers that were not compatible with any system utilized by the anthropology department.

Upon sharing the flagged remains’ accession numbers with Hood Museum officials, it became evident “that many of the marked bones were Native American ancestral remains,” the College reported.

External evaluators are currently determining the scope of Native American remains in Dartmouth’s collections, as well as any “cultural affiliation and other identifying factors,” according to the College’s press release. Moreover, museum staff members are searching for relevant historical records.

The College’s examinations of its collections have not yet determined when or how the anthropology department or the Hood Museum acquired the remains, as stated in the College press release. However, the College noted that departments frequently exchanged ancestral remains among themselves “often with little or no documentation of their movements” until the 1980s. Many of these undocumented collections were taken possession of by the Hood Museum when it opened in 1985, as per the press release.

The remains that have been discovered so far, as well as those not yet positively identified as Native American, have been relocated off-campus and are currently stored, according to the Hood Museum.

In its statement, the College revealed that it will establish a task force led by Provost David Kotz “to address institution-wide issues beyond NAGPRA, including the handling and repatriation of ancestral remains.”

These findings have also led the College to reassess its current teaching collection, as indicated in the press release. Consequently, the anthropology department will suspend osteology courses “for the foreseeable future.” Meanwhile, the College stated it intends to develop a collection that complies with legal and ethical standards.

The administration has not yet provided a timeline for the task force’s formation or the completion of its collections.

The announcement by the College comes in the wake of similar disclosures by other institutions, such as Harvard University and the University of North Dakota, which declared last year that they possessed the remains of Native Americans.