The Denver Artwork Museum (DAM) has denied repatriation requests from two federally-recognized Native Alaskan Tribes regardless of the submission of three formal claims and quite a few delegation visits.
A report within the Denver Submit earlier this month detailed the totally different limitations for Indigenous and Native teams to get better funerary objects and ancestral stays held by museums and prestigious universities within the US, even after the passing of NAGPRA.
“They’ve management of those objects, they usually could make it as straightforward or tough as they need”, Denver Submit investigative reporter Sam Tachnik advised Alaska Public Media on April 22.
In 2017, a dozen tribal members from the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska met with museum officers over a 14-foot-wide wood home partition of a raven displaying how the neighborhood tips on how to fish.
The delegation stated the 170-year-old painted panels must be returned beneath a federal regulation handed in 1990. The Native American Graves Safety and Repatriation Act, often called NAGPRA, established processes and procedures for museums and different establishments to return human stays, funerary objects and different gadgets to “Indian tribes” and “Native Hawaiian organizations”. (New federal laws had been handed earlier this yr.)
However after three days of conferences, the tribe representatives left the museum with a sense that the establishment would do every little thing in its energy to keep away from returning gadgets.
Harold Jacobs, the Tlingit and Haida’s cultural useful resource specialist who attended the conferences in Denver in 2017, advised the Denver Submit that the museum was “in all probability the worst” establishment they’d ever handled.
DAM’s curator of Native arts, John Lukavic, additionally attended the conferences in 2017 and disputed that museum officers had been “intransigent, condescending and insensitive in consultations”.
Lukavis advised the Denver Submit that the Tlingit representatives by no means submitted a proper declare beneath NAGPRA for the raven display screen, and the museum provided to assist the tribe with the paperwork required for repatriation requests.
“We’re not within the enterprise of simply gifting away our collections,” Lukavic stated. “No person is.”
The report stated DAM rejected three claims from the Tlingit tribe for a beaver clan hat, a bear shirt and a tunic on the premise of not having sufficient data.
Chip Colwell, a former curator on the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, advised the Denver Submit that DAM had a fame within the museum neighborhood for its lack of progress on NAGPRA.
The writer of the e-book “Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Contained in the Struggle to Reclaim Native America’s Tradition,” Colwell famous that tribes won’t each submitting a proper declare for repatriation in the event that they really feel an establishment has disregarded preliminary discussions.
“Museums are within the enterprise of returning issues,” Colwell advised the Denver Submit. “It’s this retentionist mentality that led to the predicament we’re in and to NAGPRA itself.”
The Denver Submit additionally famous DAM’s response to repatriation claims is markedly totally different from different establishments which have acquired repatriation requests from Native Alaskan tribes, together with the Burke Museum, the Portland Artwork Museum, the College of Maine’s Hudson Museum, and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.
DAM didn’t reply to a press request from ARTnews.