Off display: As new rules about Native American artifacts go into effect, the Field Museum and others in Illinois must comply

CHICAGO — If you stop by Chicago’s Field Museum right now and find yourself in the Alsdorf Hall of Northwest Coast and Arctic Peoples, or the Robert R. McCormick Halls of the Ancient Americas, you will notice something about the display cases: Several are covered up.

That in itself is not unusual — who hasn’t been to a museum and seen a display case displaying nothing? What’s unusual is the reason: On Jan. 12, federal regulations concerning the exhibition and study of Native American remains and sacred artifacts were tightened, to bring teeth and clarity to a set of rules that languished for decades.

The revised regulations are sweeping: They demand museums speed up the process of repatriating Native American “human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects or objects of cultural patrimony,” establishing ownership and lineage between museum collections and Native American descendants, returning anything requested. Museums must update their inventories of Native American remains and funerary objects within five years. Also, curators can no longer categorize such items as “culturally unidentifiable,” thereby holding them indefinitely. Tribal knowledge and traditions must be deferred to.

Moreover, institutions must get “free, prior and informed consent” from Native tribes before the exhibition or research of sacred artifacts. According to a Field Museum statement, the covered displays hold “cultural items that could be subject to these regulations,” and will stay covered “pending consultation with the represented (tribal) communities.” (The Field also noted it does not have any human remains on display.)

But that’s merely the tip of a cultural sea change.

Midwest museums, universities and the smallest of small-town historical societies — all of which are subject to the revisions — have been collecting Native American remains and funerary items for decades. Some for more than a century. In Illinois, this translates to hundreds of thousands of artifacts. And thousands of human remains. The University of Illinois alone holds 800 Native American remains and tens of thousands of funerary objects. The Field has likely “thousands” in its Native American collections, though a Field spokesperson said it’s hard to say how many objects will be affected. Either way, the rules will transform how institutions exhibit and research this museum cornerstone.

Indeed, quietly, they already have.

Last year at the Chicago History Museum, for instance, curators removed sacred Native American objects from the permanent exhibit “Chicago, Crossroads of America,” items that they expected would become subject to the anticipated changes in the regulations, also known as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. It was initially implemented by the Department of Interior in 1990. The revisions were unveiled in December after two years of consulting between federal agencies and federally recognized Native American tribal communities, which have long argued that the broad language of the original NAGPRA regulations allowed museums to exploit loopholes, often treating the repatriation process as an afterthought.

“The way I like to explain it to people is, ‘If I had your grandparents’ remains and possessions, and I was holding them, how would you feel?’” said Sunshine Thomas-Bear, historic preservation officer for the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, one of the many Native American communities that traces its heritage and artifacts to Illinois museums.

“I feel like I’ve been trying to just get this pretty obvious idea though people’s heads,” she said. “We want our ancestors. We want our objects. It’s a battle we’re fighting all over the country. The work cannot go far without allies. But not everyone is welcoming.”

Thomas-Bear — who sits on a repatriation committee for the Field Museum that consists of museum staff and members of several tribes — said the Field is “one of the tougher (museums) to deal with on this, partly because it is such a big institution.” And partly, she said, because, like other museums thick with gravitas, “you run into people there who feel they need to hold on to stuff and uphold practices of predecessors. They say they’re keeping it safe but the only people who should have it are tribes it belongs to.”

In one sense, changes to NAGPRA are a continuation of an ongoing 21st century shift among museums to upend and rethink centuries of racist practices — an ugly legacy that often left museums with a sizable chunk of their collections. But it also means many museums may now be required to give up the bounty of those bad practices.

The Elgin Public Museum of Natural History and Anthropology has a full-time staff of two. A few years ago, a curator came out of a storage room and said they found human remains in a drawer. Skulls, ribs, jawbones. This is not unheard of for small museums across Illinois, said Jeanne Schultz Angel, president of the Illinois Association of Museums. “A lot of collections of Indigenous culture were built after, say, a farmer or two was plowing a field. I call them drive-by drop-offs. Those items would end up on a museum’s doorsteps, and a lot of time the records of those items were left incomplete.”

That’s what happened in Elgin, Illinois.

In 1939, a farmer in South Elgin dropped off a collection of skull fragments he accidentally unearthed. The bones sat in a drawer for decades, until Catherine Bird, a retired archaeologist on the museum’s board of directors, researched tribal connections. “We weren’t even sure they were Native American,” said Sharry Blazier, museum director, “but because of NAGPRA, we took it seriously. We sent information to tribal authorities. Still, we didn’t have money for DNA tests.” Eventually, without a connection, they sent the remains to the Illinois State Museum. “But my understanding is they have such a backlog (of remains) to go through, we still don’t know who they belong to.”

Actually, according to federal statistics, the Illinois State Museum has one of the largest backlogs of unrepatriated remains and artifacts that fall under NAGPRA regulations — partly because of a 1989 state law that made the museum a repository for Native American remains discovered in Illinois.

“We have a ton of work ahead of us,” said Heather Miller, director of tribal relations for Illinois State Museum (and former executive director of the American Indian Center in Chicago). The museum is preparing the repatriation of about 1,100 remains — that’s out of more than 7,000 remains in storage. Miller, a citizen of the Wyandotte Nation (based in Oklahoma), works with about 60 tribal nations on the repatriation of artifacts, and said it only became a priority for state institutions as museum leadership changed.

“I think we can make significant changes in my lifetime,” she said, “but there are so many now, I doubt Illinois will never not have a NAGPRA case. We’ll never get to zero.”

“But some museums are shaking in their boots,” Miller said. “They see (the revisions) as a challenge to everything they’ve done up until recently. Museums were often founded to collect ‘dying cultures.’ Stuff was dug out of graves, bought from people taken advantage of. They came out of colonization, genocide — that’s the start of what we formally see as museums. Yet those communities are still here. As a Native person, artifacts, remains, it’s an extension of me. The treatment is sickening, to say the least.”

“Museums typically took a clinical view of indigenous human remains and funerary objects,” said Rachel Morgan, an archaeologist and author of “Sins of the Shovel,” a 2023 history of American archaeology. Breaking down bones to obtain information on dates and diets was seen by scientists as a harmless way to understand the past, she said, but to tribes, “it was the desecration of ancestral human remains that perpetuated historic human rights abuses.”

The changes in NAGPRA that give weight to tribal knowledge intend to correct this, often seen as a historic imbalance of power. “What museums have done in the past to Native American communities is position themselves as primary experts on Native communities,” said Shannon O’Loughlin, a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and chief executive of the Association on American Indian Affairs. “I see Native nations as the primary experts on Native nations.”

Generally, institutions, at least in public statements, are quick to agree with NAGPRA.

The Art Institute said it prioritizes NAGPRA obligations and has repatriated works in the past. Southern Illinois University in Carbondale — which contains the Center for Archaeological Investigations — has worked on repatriation with Native tribes that have ties to Illinois, as well as the Navajo and the Hopi tribes in the Southwest, and plans to hire a full-time NAGPRA coordinator by mid-February. Rose Miron, director of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry Library, said the rules do not apply to their collection, but added the institution is working with Native communities to identify and possibly restrict access to books and manuscripts that contain information on funerary ceremonies and Native sacred beliefs.

The Field Museum — founded in 1894 partly as a home for artifacts collected by pioneering anthropologist Franz Boas, whose work is upheld today as a mixed legacy, both challenging and promoting outdated ideas on Indigenous communities — has made major changes in recent years toward how it displays and researches Native American culture. A spokesperson noted the 2022 opening of a permanent exhibit, “Native Truths: Our Voices, Our Stories,” made in consultation with 130 Native tribes, and added that the museum is committed to compliance with NAGPRA and regards the regulations as “a positive step.” The museum worked with 350 tribes in 2023, the spokesperson said, and that most of those relationships are positive, though some are “more difficult — this can be the result of specific collecting histories or, more generally, of historic distrust.”

That said, last January, during a public comment period offered by the National Park Service, Julian Siggers, president and CEO of the Field Museum, wrote in a letter to the national NAGPRA program that the museum maintained “serious concerns” about the new “expectations and implementation,” citing overreaching “unrealistic deadlines,” an increased bureaucracy and a minimum $1.2 billion in costs for museums to repatriate the 850,000 “culturally unidentifiable” remains and funerary objects in national databases. Other museum professionals contacted for this article were concerned the new weight placed on tribal knowledge might dismiss the knowledge of archaeologists and historians.

Yet, the reality is, said Krystiana Krupa, the NAGPRA program officer for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a lot of museums don’t “actually know what they have until a tribe tells them.”

There are 574 federally-recognized Native communities the United States, and several thousand history museums, large and small. Matthew Bussler, tribal historic preservation officer for the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians in southwest Michigan and northeast Indiana, said he deals with repatriation from more than 50 museums and institutions. “You once had to be proactive on this, but with the new rules, every week, new places are coming out of the woodwork to work with us.”

He loves dealing with the Illinois State Museum, for instance, but cites the Field Museum as an example of an institution “making hollow statements and checking boxes.” He said repatriation is often a long process and “it can feel like a lot of places just want to know what they have to do to comply. You feel like you’re their busywork.”

It’s a bittersweet moment, he said.

“Ancestors have been held captive in some of these places for more than 100 years and had destructive work done to their bones, notwithstanding the spiritual pain. Some of our elders have grandparents still in museums. I know it’s tough for some of these places. I know it costs money, I know they adopted the result of bad practices of predecessors. But it’s on you. Make change. One conversation at a time. Start there.”