Writing Discussion
Chapter Title: SUZAN SHOWN HARJO ON THE TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE NATIVE AMERICAN GRAVES PROTECTION AND REPATRIATION ACT
Chapter Author(s): J. Kēhaulani Kauanui and Suzan Shown Harjo Book Title: Speaking of Indigenous Politics
Book Subtitle: Conversations with Activists, Scholars, and Tribal Leaders
Book Editor(s): J. Kēhaulani Kauanui
Published by: University of Minnesota Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctv8j71d.16
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146
SUZAN SHOWN HARJO ON THE TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE NATIVE AMERICAN GRAVES PROTECTION AND REPATRIATION ACT
In this interview, Suzan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee) criti- cally assesses the status of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatria- tion Act (NAGPRA), passed on November 16, 1990, for this episode recognizing the twentieth anniversary of the law. NAGPRA requires museums and federal agencies to return specific Native American items— including human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and other items of cultural patrimony— to lineal descendants and culturally affiliated Indian tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations.
Harjo is a poet, writer, lecturer, curator, and policy advocate who has helped Native peoples protect sacred places and recover more than 1 million acres of land. Over the course of four decades she has developed key laws to promote and protect Native nations, sovereignty, children, arts, cultures, and languages, including the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act, the 1989 National Museum of the American Indian Act, NAGPRA, and the 1996 Executive Order on Indian Sacred Sites. Executive director of the National Congress of American Indians and the NCAI Fund from 1984 to 1989, she has also served as special assistant for Indian legislation and liaison in the Carter administration and prin- cipal author of the 1979 President’s Report to Congress on American Indian re- ligious freedom. She also served on the Native American Policy Committee for Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and as an adviser to the Obama transition team in 2008 and 2009.
She is the president of the Morning Star Institute, a national Native rights organization founded in 1984 for Native peoples’ traditional and cultural advo- cacy, arts promotion, and research. She has been at the forefront of ongoing legal challenges to the disparaging name of the Washington, D.C., football team.
Harjo has also served as curator of numerous Native art exhibits as well as the Native Writer’s Series at the national museum of the American Indian. She
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Suzan Shown Harjo on the Native American Graves Protection Act 147
has been the recipient of numerous honors including the first Vine Deloria Jr. Distinguished Indigenous Scholar award and back- to- back residency fellow- ships by the School of Advanced Research (SAR) in Santa Fe, where she was the 2004 Dobkin artist for poetry as well as a summer scholar. It was there that I met Harjo, while I was an in- residence fellow at SAR.
Harjo, a veteran broadcaster, was producer and drama and literature direc- tor for the Pacifica WBAI- FM radio show Seeing Red and also served as news director for the American Indian Press Association, in addition to being found- ing cochair of the Howard Simmons Fund for American Indian Journalists. She joined us on the phone from Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she was attend- ing the annual meeting of the National Congress of American Indians.
This interview took place on November 16, 2010.
J. Kēhaulani Kauanui: I want to start by asking if you would share how you came to be involved in the issue of repatriation and developed the federal law, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990.
Suzan Shown Harjo: My mother and I visited the Museum of the American Indian in 1965 in New York City and saw things that really disturbed us and made us cringe and some things that were sacrilegious, some things that were ill- treated and shouldn’t be on display, and some things that weren’t treated at all, they were just disintegrating. And my mother was very, very upset and she just kept telling me, “This doesn’t belong there, that doesn’t belong there, you have to do something about this.” And then she would tell me things that I already knew and then things that I didn’t know about what we could do, how we could do this. And she was talking about what we would do once we got things in the right hands. But I didn’t have the piece of how you do that, how it goes from museum or agency or school to the right hands, to the people. And who actu- ally could handle this items— I knew I couldn’t, my mother couldn’t— we had to certainly turn them over to people who were able to receive them and who knew how to either dispose of them or to care for them.
So that was a lot to think about, and I sought out Vine Deloria Jr. because he was at the time our most prominent Native person. And he was executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, and I asked him how I would go about getting sacred things back and other important things that be- longed to the people. And he said, “I have no idea, I don’t know.” He said, “But here’s what I’ll promise. I’ll help you think about this, I’ll just back you up in whatever you want to do on it.” So, he really kept that promise, and my mother kept up her energy and really pushed on the Cheyenne side to get some things going, and Vine and my mother pushed on the Lakota and Cheyenne side. And two people— a Sundance priest, Pete Catches, and our Cheyenne Arrow- Keeper, James Medicine Elk— convened a meeting about this at Bare Butte at Holy Mountain in South Dakota in June of 1967.
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148 Suzan Shown Harjo on the Native American Graves Protection Act
They asked people— there were some ceremonies going on, various ceremo- nies there at Holy Mountain— and they asked people to stay afterward to talk about this issues of our people being prisoners of war in these museums and being displayed in museums and roadside attractions and in schools. I mean all over the place you’d see these billboards driving all over the country saying, “See the three- legged pig and two- headed dog and the Indian mummy.” And those were so common and they had grotesque images of all those things. And it was a widespread problem that was right in your face. And that was one set of issues that we were called to do something about; another was sacred places protection— which we’re still working on— and another was trying to find some museums and some non- Native people who would help us. We couldn’t think of a single museum or federal agency or state entity that was doing it right. And that’s how we came to also envision and plan for and strategize for the National Museum of the American Indian. And those two— repatriation, which we didn’t call repatriation at the time, and our cultural center which we call the National Museum right in front of Congress so they would have to look us in the face as they were making policies about us— were totally tied together, and ultimately our work that began in 1967 became the federal law that we crafted in 1989. And that was the National Museum of the American Indian Act [NMAI Act] with the historic repatriation provision that pertained only to the Smithsonian and then eleven months later we achieved the national repatria- tion act [NAGPRA], which applied to all federal agencies and all repositories of any kind that had a federal nexus that were either federal or federally assisted.
But for me, it began with my mother. Well, I should say that after we got the NMAI Act with that repatriation agreement, a Washington Post reporter called my mother and she said, “Oh, you don’t want to talk with me, you want to talk with my daughter. I don’t use words like that, repatriation; my daughter uses words like that.” And so she totally sidestepped the fact that she was my inspiration for doing this work, and she’s the one who handed it off to me as a young adult who was among the responsible adult Native people who needed to do this work.
JKK: And was she still living at the time of the passage of the 1989 and 1990 federal acts?
SSH: Yes, she was.
JKK: That’s beautiful that she got to see that in her lifetime.
SSH: Yes, and, she passed on in 2003, and my dad was still living until 2007 and so he also was able to see the National Museum of the American Indian on the mall and to see his name on one of the walls, their names on one of the walls.
JKK: You know, when you were telling the story of the displays alongside road- sides and whatnot, you used the phrase “prisoner of war,” and I want to ask you
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Suzan Shown Harjo on the Native American Graves Protection Act 149
to speak to that a little bit more, especially for those who maybe haven’t even thought about the fact that it’s Native remains that are held in these museums and in these side “freak shows.” Could you speak to the legacy of this sort of col- lecting and exhibition and the aspect of dehumanization that goes along with it?
SSH: So, part of it is the cult of the Indian head. So the people who came here from Europe brought their practices of beheading and placing heads on stakes in visible places. That I know of, Native people at least in North America— who are now Native Americans, if you will— didn’t behead. And we kept hearing in this period in the sixties, when were working very hard to try to figure out what to do about this whole set of issues, we kept hearing about people being be- headed. Every meeting that we would have, tribal leaders and religious leaders and practitioners would talk about how it was in their family or in their nation that the non- Native people would come here and cut off their heads and cut off their ancestors’ heads and dug up the graves and removed heads and removed whole bodies and took the precious things that people were buried with.
And a lot of the people we were working with were military veterans. And they— including my dad, a World War II hero— a lot of the younger people were Vietnam vets or people who had served in the military during the Viet- nam War era, and this was right in the thick of it in the mid- sixties and late sixties and so the prisoner- of- war term they used advisedly. They understood, some of them had been prisoners of war, they were the ones who introduced that term into our discourse. They said that these are our people that the Europeans hated and saw as a threat and wanted to show us as trophies after we were dead. And that was something that really resonated for all of us who came from nations and cultures that had endured massacres in our recent collective memory.
At Sand Creek, at the massacre of our Cheyenne and Arapaho and some Cayuga at Sand Creek in Colorado in 1864, the Colorado Volunteers, after murdering the people who were there in a peaceful peace camp— flying white flags, and it was a treaty peace camp— attacked at dawn, just mowed everyone down, and then mutilated them, stripped them of their body parts, cut fetuses out of pregnant women, paraded these, put genitalia over their saddle horns, made necklaces of fingers and ears and just hideous, hideous things and took them to Denver, went to an opera house, interrupted the performance and strung up these body parts across the stage.
And the Colorado Volunteers were given a standing ovation for murdering the “horrible Cheyennes.” And the head of the Colorado Volunteers had said in a public meeting before Sand Creek that all the Cheyennes had to be killed be- cause they were just vermin. And he was asked, this horrible man named John Chivington, who later as a coroner actually stole money from a corpse and so then lost his coroner job, he was asked, “Do you mean Cheyenne babies too, do they have to be killed?” And he said, “Yes, nits make lice.”
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150 Suzan Shown Harjo on the Native American Graves Protection Act
And so this is the kind of thing that we have in our recent, recent memory. And everyone that we were hearing from, every place we would go, at Zuni Pueblo, in California meeting with California Native peoples, in the Northeast we would hear about these beheadings, and that the people were left without body parts and without their heads. And whenever we asked officialdom in Washington and elsewhere about that, in educational institutions, whenever we asked scholars or bureaucrats or public officials about this kind of thing, they would say, “Oh, that never happened. You’re just dreaming.”
And it wasn’t until the late seventies and eighties that we began to uncover this history of the Indian Crania Study of the Army Surgeon General in the late 1800s, and the fact that the Army Medical Museum and the Smithsonian Museum— as it was called then— were advertising in the Rocky Mountain News and elsewhere for the ordinary citizen to go out and harvest Indian skulls. We were able to find the evidence including evidence from the Indian Crania Study in the form of reports in the national anthropological archives saying such things as “I waited until the cover of darkness till the grieving family left the gravesite and exhumed the body and decapitated the head which is transmitted forthwith.”
And these really grisly tales, the army officer report upon the murder of Mangas Coloradus, the Apaches’ leader who had been written about in the literature as having a huge head, a giant head. And I think possibly he was mur- dered for it. The army officer report says, “As soon as the shot body fell to the ground I immediately decapitated the head, weighed the brains, measured the skull and found though the skull were smaller, the brains were larger than that of Daniel Webster.” That’s a heck of a lot of information for an army officer in a Western outpost to have at the fore as the shot body fell to the ground.
So eventually we found the evidence to back up or validate some or most of what we knew from oral history about beheadings and grave- robbing and other things that went on, the mutilation of people. This harvesting, or collecting, really has heinous origins— no matter what tributary you trace backward to try to find the headwaters, you still are confronted with some nightmare or some Native nation or family or society where medicine or people or these living beings that are revered were destroyed or done damage to or just taken without explanation. Imagine the grieving family who returned to the gravesite that the army officer had looted, finding their loved one without a head— what a night- mare. This is the basis for collecting.
Some of it is just so much in the American psyche that people don’t even think they’re doing anything wrong. It’s so much a part of the American legend that Native people’s “stuff ” is up for grabs— whether it’s gold or land or water or culture . . . as though it is the divine right, the manifest destiny of the non- Native to end up with it. So grave- robbing and cultural appropriation down to images and words are not at all a leap.
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Suzan Shown Harjo on the Native American Graves Protection Act 151
There was an interesting return of people and things at the Slack Farm in Kentucky several decades ago that had been looted. People were just tak- ing things from this area where Native people were buried. There was this cemetery on the Slack Farm. And Native people went there including the Haudenosaunee [Iroquois Confederacy] tadadaho [head chief] at the time, Leon Shenandoah, and used public communication and also door- to- door discussion to ask the people to return these people and things. And a lot of them did. They walked back or drove back and returned arm bones and heads and jewelry and clothing and said that they were sorry and they didn’t realize it was wrong.
So you know, that tells you a lot about how it doesn’t even have to be pre- meditated or intended to disrupt the lives of living Native peoples or to dese- crate a grave— it can be just casual and “Well, everyone else was doing it and I was just going along with the crowd.”
JKK: It really gets at that core logic of settler colonialism because it’s about “ul- timate possession,” the symbols of conquest and genocide. But to actually own, or want to own, the remnants, literally the remains, it says a lot, it’s pretty deep. You did ask just a few minutes ago to imagine how a family would feel coming back to a site that had been disrupted, where their loved ones had been put to rest. I’m not sure I really was able to wrap my head around that entirely until I actually heard you read your poetry about this issue. Beyond understanding this issue in a legal and historical way, your poetry is so moving— another way to speak to the hearts of people. I heard you read at School for Research [now the School for Advanced Research] in Santa Fe back in 2004, and want to ask you how you find poetry as a medium to communicate this area of disposses- sion, as well as reclamation.
SSH: Well, what I do is a lot like gardening, and you don’t just plant one kind of flower, you plant all kinds. Here are some plants for food, here are some plants for medicine, here are some plants for beauty, and here are some plants for keeping bugs away from everything else. And that’s the kind of writing I do as well. Some writing I do includes the phrase “Notwithstanding the provision of any other law” and they’re very technical kinds of drafting, other kinds of writ- ing are in the category of “just tell on them.” And when you can’t do anything else, sometimes you resort to being the witness, or being the camp- crier, or being the person who sends out a cautionary tale.
And also, I commit poetry, and that comes from a different place, poetry comes from and is received as music is. So it’s not, it doesn’t come from the other side of the brain that produces “Notwithstanding any other provision of law” or that is involved with the construction of a column or an opinion piece. It comes as heart- sounds, it comes as a drumbeat might. And sometimes it’s the only way to really get your point across, and when all else fails, sometimes
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152 Suzan Shown Harjo on the Native American Graves Protection Act
a poem works, whereas people might not respond to anything else, any other kind of information, they might respond to a poem.
JKK: Well, if I can switch gears here, in narrating the opening story you really took us through a period in the sixties and mentioned the first act, the National Museum of the American Indian Act in 1989 and then the NAGPRA in 1990. Moving through those decades, was it the evidence that you were able to docu- ment that made the difference in getting those two federal laws to pass? What did it take, and what kind of resistance was there?
SSH: Well, people didn’t believe us. They were saying, “Oh no, that didn’t happen.” But here’s what we didn’t know at the time— that some of the people who were telling us that were the very people who had the knowledge at hand, were the very scholars who knew exactly where things were written and how they had covered it up. And were the same bureaucrats who knew exactly how things had happened and didn’t have those particular papers ready and were the same people who misfiled the vital information that we needed to make our case.
So we were dealing not only with disbelief but duplicity. And duplicity of a kind that made us go back and reexamine everything and re- interview and have meetings that went over the same thing over and over again. And we knew at some point that we weren’t wrong, and that we just had to do more and more in the way of policy- making. And so the first thing we really did was coalesce to gain the American Indian Religious Freedom Act [AIRFA], which applied to Native Hawaiians, Alaskan Natives, and American Indians— 1978 is when it was signed into law by President Carter.
And that had been one of his campaign promises. When he was asked in a meeting a week before the election, “Would you sign the American Indian Religious Freedom Act if Congress sends it to you?” And he said, “Yes, and I’ll tell you why, because my Bible tells me so.” And that was so interesting— it’s not true, of course, but he was making the point that the way he interpreted his religious foundational document went to respect, that he was to be a respecter of all religions. And that’s why he supported the AIRFA, and I thought that was really quite wonderful, and by the way he was the president who kept every single promise he ever made to Native people, and I’m enormously grateful for that.
And so we were able to get the AIRFA, which goes to museums and sa- cred objects and all manner of topics that have to do with religious freedom and how Native American religious freedom has been impeded. And so we gained the first real repatriation policy, and repatriation themselves under the auspices of the Religious Freedom Act. And that policy was reported to Con- gress in 1979 as part of the President’s Report to Congress on Native American religious freedom. And those federal agencies involved at the time were the
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Suzan Shown Harjo on the Native American Graves Protection Act 153
directors of all the military services museums, so the army museums, the navy museums and so forth, and the Smithsonian, although it was dragged kicking and screaming by the defense representatives.
And what they agreed to was a policy returning all cultural patrimony, and by that they meant all patrimony that would include Native human beings, and it would include Native sacred objects and historic objects. So it was everything under that term “cultural patrimony.” We changed that in the repatriation laws, which were follow- on laws to that religious freedom policy. And we changed that to “cultural patrimony” to mean those items that are communally owned and can’t have been alienated by any one person because they belong to the group as a whole, whether the group is a clan or a society or a nation.
So these policies were policies that we gained through the Religious Free- dom Act and then through the commitment to do follow- on laws. And so those repatriation laws, the Museum of the American Indian Act, the Native Languages Act, all of these are follow- on to the American Indian Religious Freedom policy. And the reason that we needed that was that we needed a positive statement that the U.S. declares that it’s the policy of the United States to preserve and protect Native American religious freedom. We had to have an affirmative statement because there had been so many federal actions taken under federal policy, really just regulations without even a law originating them during the “Civilization Act” regulations that outlawed the Sun Dance and all other similar ceremonies and outlawed the heathen acts of a conjurer by a so- called “medicine man” and so forth. They were horrible anti- Indian, anti- human- rights regulations that were in place for more than fifty years, from the 1880s to the 1930s. And we’re still recovering from those and the religious freedom policy statement is part of that recovery.
JKK: Right. Now, you mentioned that time with your mother and Vine Deloria Jr. when you were trying to imagine what it would take to get things in the right hands and how these materials and remains go from a museum and agency or school to the right people. For those unfamiliar with what this process actually looks like on the ground, could you give us an example of a successful repatriation since 1990 when the federal law passed?
SSH: Well, the Smithsonian, the army, many other entities have returned people and things that were taken from the massacre at Sand Creek, for example, including a scalp that was just repatriated a couple of weeks ago. So, things and people are being brought forward by those who hold them, and they are being identified through the repatriation process. And sometimes they are things that appear through the Post Office, through the postal service, and people will say, “We think these come from . . .” or “This has been in my family and it came from here or there.”
And some things you rely on the federal repatriation laws to coax out. And
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154 Suzan Shown Harjo on the Native American Graves Protection Act
each of the federal repositories has to do an inventory of their holdings in these areas of sacred objects and cultural patrimony and human remains, funerary items whether associated or not with a particular burial. And these inventories will lead people who are doing repatriation work to interact with the museum or other repository in such a way that they can find other materials or they have written information about companion materials or people. So the repa- triations themselves take a very long time and involve people getting ready to receive them in the first instance.
That’s sometimes the most difficult thing for people who have no ceremo- nies for, here’s what you do when a museum steals your grandpa and steals his clothes and cuts his head off— and now what? We don’t have that kind of ceremony, but, we do now. People are figuring out collectively what’s the best way to do these repatriations. In some cases, it’s left in the hands of very few people because it’s not something that the great number of Native people want to think about or can think about. It’s just too much on top of daily life of pov- erty and all sorts of emergency situations. People just can’t deal with this kind of psychic assault.
So in some cases people, the greater number of Native people are just saying “You handle this” to the people who do repatriations. I do repatriation policy, I don’t do repatriations. The only thing that I counsel people about when my counsel is sought is to approach it in a very practical, commonsense way because our people have always been very practical people. What would you do if the river overflowed and all the people were floating around? What would you do? You’d put them back immediately, on higher ground or right there when the water receded. You would do what you could to restore the peace and dignity accorded to those people, or what should be accorded those people.
We have models and commonsense ways of approaching cataclysms. And in some ways it’s easier to think about these as almost natural occurrences. You know, the high winds came, the high waters came, then to think about it for what it really was, the bad people came and did bad things to us. Or the people came and became bad people because of what they did to us. So there’s so many ways to think about this, and it’s oftentimes easier to think of it in the simplest way so you can live with the aftermath. You know, the time has passed and we have now a whole growth industry involving repatriation, including repatria- tion offices in the federal government and the main coordinating one for the national NAGPRA: the national repatriation law is in the National Park Service in the Interior Department. And it has just been responsible for a ruling that sanctioned grave- robbing. It in a really calculated way decided that it was good politics to split the difference between the people and things, so the human remains are now subject because of this rule to repatriation by Native people, even if they can’t be completely culturally identified.
And they’re in this category called “culturally unidentifiable” human re-
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Suzan Shown Harjo on the Native American Graves Protection Act 155
mains. And it doesn’t mean they’re unidentifiable; it just means they haven’t been identified. And one of the main ways that you identity them is by the things they were buried with, but the crass political decision was made to let the museums and agencies keep the things they were buried with, the associ- ated funerary objects. So, we Native people can get Grandma back but not her moccasins, not her shawl. Or maybe a precious item that her grandchildren put in with her as a token of their love for her, so we may not know who that is because we don’t have the associated funerary objects. So this is really just an example of how wrongheaded people can be even when they’re implementing a federal law, which is designed to bring some small measure of justice for Native people in the modern era.
The repatriation laws are really our human rights laws. And what we’re seeing happen is human rights stripped away by just such rulings and it really deserves the attention of everyone, all decent people should look at this and say, “Their graves were already robbed once. Don’t let the museums be the fences for the thieves.”
JKK: This is the 2010 ruling?
SSH: Yes. And it’s not even unassociated funerary objects, it’s associated funer- ary objects with these people that are being declared as the property of the mu- seums and other entities that hold them today. So if you hold onto stolen goods long enough they’re yours— that is the message. And that shouldn’t be the message of a human rights law, and that shouldn’t be the message of any law.
JKK: That’s right. And that also means that even if Grandma’s entire body comes back whole in terms of the remains, it’s still a form of dismemberment.
SSH: It is indeed. Because American common law, European common law, everyone’s common law is based on the rights of the deceased and the rights of the deceased family. And this is property of the deceased. So it’s a desecration of that person’s final resting place. It’s being assaulted again while we’re just now beginning to heal from the wounds of the initial assault.
JKK: It also seems, then, to be coming on the long trail of the last two decades where our anthropology and archaeology departments, for example, that didn’t want to relinquish their collections, often classified some of these materials as “culturally unidentifiable” as a loophole to hold on to them. And you’ve just pointed out— if they’ve been marked “culturally unidentifiable” that just sim- ply means that they haven’t yet been identified. And so there are gatekeepers preventing them from being properly identified and therefore reclaimed for a proper burial.
SSH: Right. And so again, it’s hiding the evidence. You’re letting these pawn- shops and roadside attractions, even if they’re called a “national museum,” hide the evidence of their bad faith.
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156 Suzan Shown Harjo on the Native American Graves Protection Act
JKK: Well, certainly we need some broad- based education so that, as you say, the common person can denounce this ongoing dispossession and desecration. As we’re concluding the interview, where does this leave us in terms of the future of NAGPRA?
SSH: The future is bright if you look at it as the act is intended, as justice and human rights for Native Americans. If you look at it as a vehicle for loopholes allowing scientists and non- scientists the ability to continue to pillage and to loot and to profit from it, then what’s at risk are all the goodwill fair dealings and optimism that have been created by the repatriation laws. And there’s a lot of that, there’s a lot of education that has taken place. There are a lot of people who understand much more, non- Native people understand much more about Native peoples than they did before the repatriation law as a result of the com- ing together of the people who care most about these people and these materi- als. So we can either go forward in a good way or we can revert to the stuff of massacres and nightmares.
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