Native Americans
Racism, 'Morbid Curiosity' Drove US Museums to Collect Indigenous Remains
In December 1900, John Wesley Powell received “the most unusual Christmas present of any person in the United States, if not in the world,” reported the Chicago Tribune.
The gift for this first director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of Ethnology was a sealskin sack containing the mummified remains of an Alaska Native.
The sender was a government employee hired to hunt Indian “relics,” who said the remains had been difficult to acquire because “to come into the possession of a dead Indian is a great crime among the Indians.”
The report concluded that it was the only “Indian relic" of this kind at the Smithsonian and it was “beyond money value.”
As it turned out, it was not the museum’s only Alaskan mummy. In 1865, even before the U.S. purchased Alaska from Russia, Smithsonian naturalist William H. Dall was hired to accompany an expedition to study the potential for a telegraph route through Siberia to Europe. In his spare time, he looted graves in the Yukon and caves on several Aleutian Islands.
After the U.S. sealed the deal with Russia, the San Francisco-based Alaska Commercial Company won exclusive trading rights and established more than 90 trading posts in Alaska to meet the U.S. demand for ivory and furs.
It also instructed agents “to collect and preserve objects of interest in ethnology and natural history” and forward them to the Smithsonian. Ernest Henig looted 12 preserved bodies and a skull from a cave in the Aleutians in 1874. He donated two to California’s Academy of Science and sent the remainder to the Smithsonian.
More than 30 years after the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act meant to return those remains, a ProPublica investigation last year estimated that more than 110,000 Native American, Native Hawaiian and Alaska Native ancestors remain in public collections across the U.S.
It is not known how many Indigenous remains are closeted in private or overseas collections.
“Museums collected massive numbers, perhaps even millions,” said anthropologist John Stephen “Chip” Colwell, who previously served as curator of anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. “Out of the 100 remains we [at the Denver museum] returned, I think only about five or seven individuals were actually even studied.”
So, what sparked this 19th-century frenzy for collecting human remains?
Reconciling science, religion
From the moment they first encountered Indigenous Americans, European thinkers struggled to understand who they were, where they came from, and whether they could be “civilized.”
The Christian bible taught them that all humans descended from Adam and that God created Adam in his own image. So why, Europeans wondered, did Native Americans, Africans and Asians look different?
Some Europeans theorized that all humans were created white, but dietary or environmental differences caused some of them to turn “brown, yellow, red or black.”
Other Europeans refused to accept that they shared a common ancestor with people of color and theorized that God created the races separately before he created Adam.
The birth of scientific racism
Presumptions that compulsory education and Christianization would force Native Americans to abandon their traditional cultures and become “civilized” into mainstream European-American culture proved untrue. So 19th-century scientists turned to advancements in medicine to “prove” the inferiority of Indigenous peoples.
“That’s when you see scientists like Samuel Morton, who invented a pseudoscience trying to place peoples within these social hierarchies based on their biology, and they needed bones to solidify those racial hierarchies,” said Colwell, who is editor-in-chief of the online magazine SAPIENS and author of “Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America's Culture.”
Morton was a Philadelphia physician who collected hundreds of human skulls of all races, mostly Native American, that were forwarded to him by physicians on the frontier. In his 1839 book "Crania Americana," Morton classified human races based on skull measurements. Morton's conclusions were used to support racist ideologies about the inferiority of non-white humans.
“They are not only averse to the restraints of education, but for the most part incapable of a continued process of reasoning on abstract subjects,” he wrote of Native Americans. “The structure of [the Native] mind appears to be different from that of the white man, nor can the two harmonise in their social relations except on the most limited scale.”
Despite Morton’s legacy as an early figure in scientific racism — ideologies that generate pseudo-scientific racist beliefs — his work earned him a reputation at the time as “a jewel of American science” and influenced the field of anthropology and public policy for decades.
In 1868, for example, the U.S. Surgeon General turned his attention away from the Civil War to the so-called “Indian wars” and instructed field surgeons to collect Native American skulls and weapons and send them to the Army Medical Museum in Washington “to aid in the progress of anthropological science.”
“For museums, especially the early years of collecting, it was a form of trophy keeping, a competition between museums,” Colwell told VOA. “And some of it was a competition between national governments to accumulate big collections to demonstrate their global and imperial aspirations.”
All the rest, he said, were fragments of morbid curiosity.
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Native groups: Exit polls on Native voter preferences were flawed
In the days following the November 5 election, media outlets widely cited NBC exit polls indicating that 65% of Native American voters cast their ballots for Donald Trump.
While Native American advocacy groups acknowledge a trend of Native voters shifting toward the political right, they argued that the polling in this case was flawed and did not accurately represent their demographic.
NBC did not conduct the polling itself. It is one of four major news networks in the National Election Pool, or NEP, which relies on marketing research company Edison Research to question voters as they leave the polls.
Edison conducted phone, email and text message surveys of absentee and early voters in Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada and Ohio before Election Day and polled exiting voters at more than 300 polling stations across the U.S.
Once polling stations shut down on election night, Edison forwarded the voting data to NEP members so that they could analyze answers and project the winners.
NBC was the first to report exit polling data that included Native Americans. ABC News lumped Native Americans into the "all other races" category, as did CBS News and CNN.
The 65% figure prompted skepticism and confusion among some Native American observers. Native News Online, working with Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism and national survey firm Qualtrics, surveyed 865 Native voters and found that 51% of Native voters voted for Donald Trump.
In contrast, 60% of the nearly 5,000 Native Americans who participated in Illuminative's Indigenous Futures Survey in 2020 identified as liberal, and 51% said they were Democrats.
A closer look at the numbers
Stephanie Fryberg (Tulalip), who leads Northwestern University's Research for Indigenous Social Action and Equity collaborative, was puzzled by the NBC calculation.
In a November 8 editorial in Native News Online, she said that the Native voter sample size was too small and couldn't accurately reflect Native voter preferences nationwide. She pointed out that 80% of respondents were from urban and suburban areas, while less than 20% came from rural areas.
In a separate editorial on November 18, Native News Online editor Levi Rickert questioned whether the respondents were legitimate members of federally recognized tribes.
“Perhaps the most challenging aspect of research and data collection among Native Americans is self-identification,” he wrote. “For various reasons, many people claim Native American ancestry. Among Native Americans, a common joke is that the largest 'tribe' in Indian Country is the 'Wannabe' tribe.”
VOA reached out to Fryberg to ask how she arrived at the numbers.
"We wanted to better understand the sample of Native voters that major news organizations were using to draw broad conclusions about voting patterns in the 2024 election," she answered by email. "Reports from the NEP show that only about 1% of these respondents identified as Native American, equating to roughly 229 individuals … underscoring the urgent need for more comprehensive and inclusive sampling strategies that genuinely reflect Native voices in electoral data."
Edison Research Executive Vice President Rob Farbman agreed that the sample size was small, but he told VOA that it met the NEP's minimum criteria for reporting subgroups.
"This is a national survey meant to represent the country, but subgroups as small as Native Americans … are difficult to measure," he said. "It's certainly possible that our survey is underrepresenting people that live on reservations."
He also noted that results at the county level are still coming in.
"And the votes that we've been seeing so far are showing that Trump is doing way better among American Indians than last time,” Farbman said.
Allison Neswood, a staff attorney at the Native American Rights Fund, said that exit polls should be viewed "with a lot of skepticism," and that the Edison poll "should really be discarded."
"Real hard conclusions will take a little bit more time," she said. "We're going to have to get more granular data, below the county level, to the precinct level."
Land Back movement gains ground, but full tribal control still out of reach
Land Back is a global, Indigenous-led movement advocating for the return of stolen lands.
While Indigenous communities have long engaged in that fight, “Land Back” as a meme began to gain popularity in 2019.
It now describes a decentralized international movement that emphasizes treaty rights, tribal sovereignty, climate justice and cultural revival.
“Land Back is like a prism with many facets to it,” said Alvin Warren, a former lieutenant governor of the Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico who has spent decades advocating for the restoration and protection of Indigenous lands.
“For me, within the paradigm of the United States legal system and land tenure system, it absolutely means the restoration of full title to Indigenous people of a particular piece of land that is part of their original homeland.”
And it doesn’t stop with the transfer of legal title.
“It’s about reviving the land-based aspects of our ways of life,” he said. “It could be agriculture, it could be subsistence hunting, it could be gathering things. It is about reuniting, reconnecting us with our homeland, about undoing the many layers of separation and disconnection from our homelands that has been the goal of colonization in this country and in other parts of the world.”
Nick Tilsen, an Oglala Lakota from the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, gained national attention in July 2020 for blockading the road to Mount Rushmore ahead of a visit by then-President Donald Trump.
Shortly afterward, the NDN Collective activist launched a #LandBack campaign for “the reclamation of everything stolen from the original peoples.”
“When they [the federal government] took the land, they took everything from our people,” Tilsen said. “They took our governance structures. They took our culture. They took our language. They tried to destroy the familial structure of our people, our ability to make decisions over our food systems and our education systems.”
Tilsen believes the U.S. government should return all public lands, including the Black Hills, which the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty designated for the “absolute and undisturbed use and occupation” of Sioux Bands, today known as the Oceti Sakowin (Seven Council Fires).
That treaty was nullified without the tribe’s consent in the Indian Appropriations Bill of 1876 after a government and scientific expedition confirmed the presence of gold in the hills.
Is getting that land back a realistic goal?
James Swan, a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe in South Dakota, doesn’t think so.
“It’s a pipe dream,” the founder of the grassroots Indigenous rights group United Urban Warrior Society, said. “But let’s say the U.S. government does return the Black Hills. Then what?”
Swan points out that tribes are not truly independent.
“They're part of the U.S. government,” he said. “A tribal chairman might be elected by the tribe, but he can't do anything without the tribal superintendent’s permission, and the superintendent works for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.”
Fragmented land ownership
In 1887, the government allotted some treaty lands to Native American heads of household. The remaining land, over 36 million hectares, was sold to settlers or granted to newly formed states to generate funds to support public institutions such as schools, jails or hospitals. States were allowed to sell off some of their trust land “for no less than ten dollars an acre.”
Grist and High Country News recently reported that states today hold more than 809,000 hectares of surface and subsurface land on Indian reservations.
Federal oversight
The U.S. government legally owns 21 million hectares of reservation land that it holds in trust for the benefit of tribes and their members.
Federal rules limit what tribes can do with that trust land — they can’t sell, lease or transfer it without Interior Department approval and must follow strict environmental rules for many projects.
Within that trust land are restricted-fee lands that are owned by individual Native Americans or tribes but cannot be sold or transferred without federal approval and are exempt from state or local land-use regulations.
There are also fee-simple lands within those reservations that are owned outright by individuals or tribes.
“The fee-simple owner is the absolute total owner,” said Robert Miller, a law professor at Arizona State University and an expert in federal Indian law. “You have all the rights of ownership. Leave it to whoever you want. Sell it to whoever you want for a dollar or a million dollars.”
Previously, tribes were advised to purchase reservation land under a fee-simple title.
“But the Supreme Court ruled in 1992 and 1998 that if a tribe holds land under [a] fee-simple title, the state can impose annual taxes on it,” Miller said. “This has led tribes to request that the Interior Department take their fee-simple land into trust to avoid state interference.”
Pathways to land back
In December 2012, the Interior Department launched the Land Buy-Back Program, which purchased and restored to tribal trust more than 1.2 million hectares of land in 15 states over 10 years.
“The Land Buy-Back Program’s progress puts the power back in the hands of tribal communities to determine how their lands are used — from conservation to economic development projects,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said ahead of the 2023 White House Tribal Nations Summit in Washington.
But some Native Americans are skeptical about the program.
“It is not about returning lost lands and putting them into trust for Tribes,” Todd Hall (Hidatsa) wrote in Buffalo’s Fire, an independent news platform run by the Indigenous Media Freedom Alliance. “It is about dispossessing Individual Indians of their landownership rights and converting those rights to the collective ownership of the Tribal governments which were enacted by the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934.”
Today, tribes across the U.S. continue to buy fractional interests in trust or restricted land from willing sellers, often with help from conservancy groups and private landowners.
In September, the Western Rivers Conservancy transferred a 188-hectare former private cattle ranch to the Graton Rancheria in California for “permanent conservation and stewardship.”
Individuals also make private donations of land. In October 2018, Iowa citizen Rich Snyder voluntarily signed over land he owned in southern Colorado to the Ute Tribe.
In June, California announced it would return 1,133 hectares of ancestral land to the Shasta Indian Nation. Montana is currently considering the return of 11,800 hectares of trust land to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes on the Flathead Reservation in exchange for federal public lands outside of the reservation.
A University of Montana study in 2023 identified 44 laws placing federal public lands into tribal trust. Many, however, upheld existing rights such as access, grazing, mining or water use. Others stipulate that the land remain “forever wild” or be used only for “traditional purposes” such as hunting or holding ceremonies.
There are also legal routes to getting land back, especially with the U.S. Supreme Court establishing a key precedent in the landmark McGirt v. Oklahoma case, which reaffirmed that a large area of eastern Oklahoma still belongs to the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.
“I predict there will be 30 to 50 years of litigation over every little issue if the state, feds and tribes don't cooperate,” Miller said.
Wisconsin agency issues permits for Enbridge Line 5 reroute around reservation
Enbridge's contentious plan to reroute an aging pipeline around a northern Wisconsin tribal reservation moved closer to reality Thursday after the company won its first permits from state regulators.
Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources officials announced they have issued construction permits for the Line 5 reroute around the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa's reservation. The energy company still needs discharge permits from the DNR and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The project has generated fierce opposition. The tribe wants the pipeline off its land, but tribal members and environmentalists maintain rerouting construction will damage the region's watershed and perpetuate the use of fossil fuels.
Permits issued with conditions
The DNR issued the construction permits with more than 200 conditions attached. The company must complete the project by November 14, 2027, hire DNR-approved environmental monitors and allow DNR employees to access the site during reasonable hours.
The company also must notify the agency within 24 hours of any permit violations or hazardous material spills affecting wetlands or waterways; can't discharge any drilling mud into wetlands, waterways or sensitive areas; keep spill response equipment at workspace entry and exit points; and monitor for the introduction and spread in invasive plant species.
Enbridge officials issued a statement praising the approval, calling it a "major step" toward construction that will keep reliable energy flowing to Wisconsin and the Great Lakes region.
Bad River tribal officials warned in their own statement Thursday that the project calls for blasting, drilling and digging trenches that would devastate area wetlands and streams and endanger the tribe's wild rice beds. The tribe noted that investigations identified water quality violations and three aquifer breaches related to the Line 3 pipeline's construction in northern Minnesota.
"I'm angry that the DNR has signed off on a half-baked plan that spells disaster for our homeland and our way of life," Bad River Chairman Robert Blanchard said in the statement. "We will continue sounding the alarm to prevent yet another Enbridge pipeline from endangering our watershed."
Tribe sues in 2019
Line 5 transports up to 23 million gallons (about 87 million liters) of oil and natural gas daily from Superior, Wisconsin, through Michigan to Sarnia, Ontario. About 19 kilometers (12 miles) of the pipeline run across the Bad River reservation.
The tribe sued Enbridge in 2019 to force the company to remove the pipeline from the reservation, arguing that the 71-year-old line is prone to a catastrophic spill and that land easements allowing Enbridge to operate on the reservation expired in 2013.
Enbridge has proposed a 66-kilometer (41-mile) reroute around the reservation's southern border.
The company has only about two years to complete the project. U.S. District Judge William Conley last year ordered Enbridge to shut down the portion of pipeline crossing the reservation within three years and pay the tribe more than $5 million for trespassing. An Enbridge appeal is pending in a federal appellate court in Chicago.
Michigan's Democratic attorney general, Dana Nessel, filed a lawsuit in 2019 seeking to shut down twin portions of Line 5 that run beneath the Straits of Mackinac, the narrow waterways that connect Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. Nessel argued that anchor strikes could rupture the line, resulting in a devastating spill. That lawsuit is still pending in a federal appellate court.
Michigan regulators in December approved the company's $500 million plan to encase the portion of the pipeline beneath the straits in a tunnel to mitigate risk. The plan is awaiting approval from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
New Mexico helps Indigenous people search for missing family members
The U.S. Department of the Interior says American Indian and Alaska Native people are at a disproportionate risk of going missing, experiencing violence or being murdered. In the Southwest state of New Mexico, some Indigenous families are using a new grant to help expand their search for justice. Gustavo Martinez Contreras has our story.
Native Americans share mixed reactions to Trump win
In 2020, a record-setting six Native American candidates secured seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. This year, nine Native candidates ran for Congress, including four incumbents.
Confirmed winners
Representative Josh Brecheen, a Choctaw Republican representing Oklahoma's 2nd District, retained his seat, securing 74% of the vote. He thanked his supporters afterward, promising "to continue our work to secure our borders, rein in deficit spending and put a stop to our currency devaluation driving inflation."
Republican incumbent Representative Tom Cole, Chickasaw, was reelected to serve Oklahoma's 4th District for an 11th term.
Kansas Democrat Representative Sharice Davids, a Ho-Chunk citizen, retained the House seat she won in 2018.
"We are going to keep up our fight. We are absolutely going to keep up our fight," Davids told supporters. "To do things like expand Medicaid, making sure that we have good public schools, making sure we're funding public education including special ed, making sure we have a Kansas that actually works for everyone."
Incumbent Representative Mary Peltola (Yup'ik), a Democrat, has represented the Alaska district at large since 2022. The race has not yet been called, but as of Friday evening, she was behind her Republican opponent. Alaska uses ranked-choice voting, by which voters rank candidates in order of preference. Election officials are still waiting for incoming ballots that have yet to be counted and hope to certify results by the end of November.
Results are still pending on whether former Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez will win his bid to represent Arizona's 2nd District in the House.
"We're still waiting for some votes to come in, especially in the counties that are more highly Democratic, so it will be interesting to see how those votes look," Nez told local news outlet InMaricopa.
How Natives voted
As VOA previously reported, experts indicate that Native voters are not strictly partisan; instead, they prioritize issues that best address tribal needs. While they have traditionally leaned Democratic, recent statistics reveal a shift of the Native vote toward the right.
The exact number of Native Americans who voted on November 5 remains unknown. This year saw expanded efforts by organizers to mobilize Native voters, especially in swing states such as Arizona and New Mexico. However, barriers to voting persist for many Native communities, including limited access to polling locations and mail services on reservations, which can make casting ballots challenging.
"Indian people are microcosms of society," Aaron Payment, former chairperson of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa in Michigan, commented on the Native America Calling podcast Wednesday. "A lot of Indian people live in rural areas … so people voted based on what they heard."
He cited the impact of Christian missionaries, as well as the pro-life movement and the National Rifle Association.
Supporters of President-elect Donald Trump in Indian Country include Myron Lizer, former vice president of the Navajo Nation.
"Our people have been voting Democrat for over five decades and nothing's changed," he told the Navajo Times in late October.
Cherokee citizen Senator Markwayne Mullin and Representative Cole, both of Oklahoma, also backed Trump and stand to play key roles in the new administration.
Project 2025
The conservative Heritage Foundation in 2023 released Project 2025, a mandate for a future Republican administration. It proposes some substantial changes that directly affect tribes.
"His Project 2025 plans will centralize power in the executive office, an extreme threat to Tribal-federal relations and our rights as sovereign nations to make decisions about policies that impact our lands, resources, and people," Judith LeBlanc (Caddo), director of the Native Organizers Alliance, wrote for Native News Online Thursday.
The plan proposes to reverse Biden/Harris climate change policies and prioritize coal, oil, gas and mineral mining.
"Project 2025 specifically calls for expanding the Willow Project, drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, mining in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters, and shrinking Bears Ears National Monument," said Gussie Lord, managing attorney for Earthjustice’s Tribal Partnerships Program.
"Historically, these kinds of activities have resulted in negative impacts to tribal resources, such as serious long-term pollution and destruction of sacred sites and cultural resources. The tribes we work with at Earthjustice are fighting to preserve natural areas so they can continue to be used," Lord said.
While unwelcome news for some tribes, the plan could be good news for others.
"There are some tribes, I think energy [producing] tribes, that are probably going to be pleased with the outcome because they didn't quite jump on board on the clean energy [agenda]," Payment noted during the Native America Calling discussion.
Trump has vowed to launch unprecedented deportation operations and continue work on the southern border wall. The Tohono O'odham tribe, whose members straddle the U.S.-Mexico border, have complained that wall construction damaged cultural sites and restricted free movement across the border.
The Heritage plan calls for restructuring or abolishing some federal departments. It would eliminate the Education Department and shift its Indian education program to the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). It would also eliminate the Head Start child care programs that currently serve tens of thousands of Native American children.
Project 2025 does not explicitly mention moving the BIA to the State Department, an idea that was reportedly floated during Trump's first term.
Levi Rickert (Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation), publisher and editor of Native News Online, advises caution.
"Given the complexities of issues impacting tribal nations, more research and at least a year-long consultation should be conducted with tribal leaders and only after an agreement has been reached should such a drastic change take place," he told VOA via email. "Ideally, a separate department or federal agency called Indian Affairs should be created so that tribal nations can be afforded the due respect they deserve."
But Project 25 does propose restructuring the Interior Department (DOI); possible contenders to head DOI include Doug Burgum, governor of oil-rich North Dakota.
Looking forward
Tribal leaders are urging citizens to set aside differences and focus on the work ahead. After all, they've endured much over the centuries.
"Now is the time to come together as a Tribe and support each other and look out for one another as has been our way for generations," Jaison Elkins, chairman of the Muckleshoot tribe in Washington state, posted on the tribe's website. "There will be opportunities and obstacles in the upcoming months, as there always are, but together we can handle anything."