jtrent238 test blog: Race/Related: Congress Told Colleges to Return Native Remains. What’s Taking So Long?

September 17, 2022

The University of North Dakota campus in Grand Forks, where the remains of Native American people have been found.Jaida Grey Eagle for The New York Times

'It's Something That's Going to Be Weighing on Us'

By Mitch Smith and Julie Bosman

GRAND FORKS, N.D. — The tribal leaders arrived at the University of North Dakota last month for a somber, secret task.

For three days, they scoured storage rooms, recited prayers and hauled boxes. The move required closing hallways, pausing construction projects and turning off smoke detectors so that the burning of sage or sweet grass would not trigger an alarm.

It was a first step in the long process of returning artifacts and the remains of Native American people from the university to tribes.

More than 30 years ago, Congress passed a law requiring colleges and museums to return Native remains and artifacts in their possession. But a generation later, the returns have been slow and halting, when they have happened at all. Many institutions have dragged out the process, questioning tribes' links to artifacts and, in some cases, disputing whether items should be returned. Others, like the University of North Dakota, seem to have made no comprehensive effort to find and return items until recently, leaving questions about how so many decades passed without progress.

"There had to have been someone who opened a box, saw something, looked and then they walked away," said Crystal Alberts, an English professor at the University of North Dakota who was present when a first box of human remains was located on campus in March.

The process is especially painful and personal on North Dakota's campus because of the school's demographics as well as its past. The university has a significant population of Native American students, an on-campus center for American Indians and thriving academic programs for Native students pursuing careers in medicine, psychology and nursing. But the college's history includes a long-running dispute over a former mascot, the Fighting Sioux, that remains a common sight on campus even though many find it offensive.

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"U.N.D. set the standard for desecrating and disrespecting, dishonoring Indigenous people," said Hillary Kempenich, a graduate of the university who is a member of the Turtle Mountain Anishinaabe, and who said racism against Native Americans was a defining part of her campus experience about 20 years ago. "While they may be giving those remains back, they have a lot of responsibility to help us heal, to help us move forward."

North Dakota is one of many colleges grappling with these issues. Through much of the 20th century, collecting Native artifacts and remains was seen by many academic institutions in this country as a legitimate pursuit, with archaeologists digging up burial sites to gather items for study and display. Harvard, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Alabama are among the schools that have faced criticism in recent years for their handling of returning remains and artifacts. Remains from more than 108,000 Indigenous people and more than 765,000 artifacts are known to be held by museums, universities and federal agencies, according to the National Park Service.

Late last month, campus officials in North Dakota announced that they had found the remains and artifacts this year. They promised that they would be guided by the wishes of tribal leaders as they returned what had long ago been plundered. But they are only in the beginning stages of the difficult process of determining which human remains belong to which tribes.

"The clock is ticking and we have to get moving quickly," said Andrew Armacost, the university president, who has repeatedly apologized to Native Americans in recent days. "And we have to think about the trade-offs," he added. "Do we wait for the set of ancestors and items to be fully identified and marked to specific sites? Or do we do it in segments?"

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Nerissa Dolney, who is pursuing a doctorate in psychology, described learning that the school had the remains was a "soul wound." She is a member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, whose reservation is in South Dakota and North Dakota.Jaida Grey Eagle for The New York Times

On the neatly landscaped campus in Grand Forks, the announcement pained Native Americans. Devon Headdress, a senior who is Hidatsa and wants to become a doctor, said he initially felt a deep anger and struggled to focus in class after he heard the news. Nerissa Dolney, who is pursuing a doctorate in psychology, described it as a "soul wound."

"You feel it so deeply, and it's not really a feeling you can describe to other people," said Ms. Dolney, who is a member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, whose reservation is in South Dakota and North Dakota.

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Native students and faculty spoke of reconciling anger over the university's past wrongdoing with what most described as a good-faith effort, at least so far, to return the remains. Mr. Headdress, the president of the university's Indian Association, said his initial frustration that Dr. Armacost waited six months to publicize the discovery subsided when the president explained that he had done so at the request of tribal leaders. Elleh Driscoll, a graduate student, said she was counting on the university to keep its promises.

"This is going to be something that we carry around probably for the rest of the time we're at U.N.D.," said Ms. Driscoll, who is from the Meskwaki tribe, which is based in Iowa. "It's something that's going to be weighing on us."

University leaders have been vague about where the remains and artifacts were found on campus, about which faculty members might have collected and stored them, and about which tribes might have claims.

Some university officials said they believed that most or all of the human remains were from people who died before the 19th century, though Dr. Armacost, who became president in 2020, said it was too soon to know that. Some of the remains may have been used as teaching aids in classrooms.

One professor and acting president in the early days of the university, Henry Montgomery, whose photo is on display in the administrative building, was well known for excavating Native burial mounds. In 1906, he published a paper called "Remains of Prehistoric Man in the Dakotas."

Until recent decades, Native Americans' objections to excavations of burial sites were routinely brushed aside in favor of arguments that skeletal remains and objects had scholarly value.

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