WASHINGTON — 

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.

WASHINGTON — 

Here are some of the Native American-related stories in the news this past week:

South Dakota governor: Some tribal leaders "benefiting" from drug cartels

Addressing a town hall meeting in Winner, South Dakota, this week, Governor Kristi Noem described the U.S.-Mexico border as a “war zone” and suggested that drug cartels may be using Indian reservations as a base of operations.

“Mexican cartels are set up here in South Dakota … on our tribal reservations, trafficking drugs and kids and sex trafficking out of South Dakota throughout the Midwest,” she said. “And we've got some tribal leaders that I believe are personally benefiting from the cartels being there, and that's why they attack me every day.”

Her remarks echoed those she made in a January 31 speech before a joint session of state lawmakers, expressing her willingness to send razor wire and National Guard troops to Texas to help defend its border with Mexico.

The Oglala Sioux Tribe, or OST, later banned Noem from the Pine Ridge Reservation.

“Only entry plus enmity constitutes an invasion,” OST President Frank Star Comes Out said in a statement posted on Facebook, accusing Noem of attempting to curry favor with former President Donald Trump.

Noem has been named as a potential running mate for Trump. At Wednesday’s town hall, she acknowledged being on a short list of candidates.

Read more:

Lawsuit aims to hold Arizona health agencies accountable for deaths in fake sober homes

A Phoenix, Arizona, law firm has filed a pair of wrongful death lawsuits against Arizona health care agencies on behalf of two Navajo men who died while in the care of fraudulent sober living homes.

The lawsuits claim the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System and the Arizona Department of Health Services are legally at fault for the deaths of two Navajo citizens who fell victim to "bad actors" seeking to defraud Arizona's health care system by billing for addiction treatment services that were never provided. The lawsuits allege that state agencies knew about the massive fraud but continued to pay home operators “exorbitant rates and amounts of money.”

Read more:

Indigenous father to school board: Allow my son to wear his eagle feather

A Native American high school senior has won the right to wear an eagle feather to graduation ceremonies in June after his father, Stephen White Eagle, successfully argued his case before a Tennessee school board.

“My son and I have been told that his religious beliefs do not fit into the school’s policy. And that is unfair and unconstitutional,” said White Eagle. He and his son are Southern Cheyenne and enrolled citizens of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes in Oklahoma.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, many schools across the country ban the wearing of eagle feathers or other regalia at graduation, saying it violates their dress codes.

Eagle feathers, a symbol of strength and achievement, are often given to youth when they reach important milestones in life.

"You cannot pick and choose which religions you want to honor and respect in schools,” White Eagle told VOA via Facebook this week. “If you allow one religion, especially Christianity or Catholicism — both foreign religions to these lands — then you must allow the original religion, that being, of the Indigenous Native American peoples.”

White Eagle said he believes all Americans should work together to respect and honor all races, all colors and all creeds — and “set an example for future generations.”

Read more:

Osage songwriter, drum and dancers perform at 96th annual Academy Awards ceremony

Osage songwriter Scott George, singers, dancers and drum keepers performed "Wahzhazhe” (“Song for My Osage People”) Sunday at the Academy Awards ceremony.

George, a citizen of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma, co-wrote the song with Osage Language expert Vann Bighorse for Best Picture nominee “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

The lyrics are: “Wahzhazhe no-zhin te-tha-bey, Wa-kon-da they-tho gah-ka-bey (Osage people, stand and be recognized. God made it for us)."

The composer wanted to evoke the style of traditional I’n-Lon-Schka (“Playground of the First Son”) dances, held on weekends each June, said George E. "Tink" Tinker, an Osage citizen and professor emeritus of American Indian Cultures at Iliff School of Theology.

“He could not merely take a song from the ceremony and sing it, so he wrote this song to mimic the style of the songs sung in the ceremony without violating the ceremony itself,” he said.

The dance was brought to the Osage by the Kansa (Kaw) Nation after the Osage were forced from Kansas to Oklahoma in the late 19th century.

“These dances mark the coming together of community today and continue as one of the only full-community ceremonies to have survived colonial invasion,” Tinker explained.

Separately, “Killers” lead actress Lily Gladstone, who won a Golden Globe Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award earlier this year, was nominated for this year’s Oscar for Best Actress but did not win.

She reacted gracefully on X: “Feeling the love big time today, especially from Indian Country. Kitto”kuniikaakomimmo”po’waw — seriously, I love you all.”

The Biden administration will be allocating more than $120 million to tribal governments to fight the impacts of climate change, the Department of the Interior announced Thursday. The funding is designed to help tribal nations adapt to climate threats, including relocating infrastructure.

Indigenous peoples in the U.S. are among the communities most affected by severe climate-related environmental threats, which have already negatively impacted water resources, ecosystems and traditional food sources in Native communities in every corner of the U.S.

"As these communities face the increasing threat of rising seas, coastal erosion, storm surges, raging wildfires and devastation from other extreme weather events, our focus must be on bolstering climate resilience, addressing this reality with the urgency it demands, and ensuring that tribal leaders have the resources to prepare and keep their people safe is a cornerstone of this administration," Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna, said in a Wednesday press briefing.

Indigenous peoples represent 5% of the world's population, but they safeguard 80% of the world's biodiversity, according to Amnesty International. In the U.S., federal and state governments are relying more on the traditional ecological knowledge of Indigenous peoples to minimize the ravages of climate change, and Haaland said ensuring that trend continues is critical to protecting the environment.

"By providing these resources for tribes to plan and implement climate risk, implement climate resilience programs in their own communities, we can better meet the needs of each community and support them in incorporating Indigenous knowledge when addressing climate change," she said.

The department has adopted a policy on implementing Indigenous knowledge, said Assistant Secretary of the Interior Bryan Newland, a citizen of the Bay Mills Indian Community. "We are also investing in tribes' ability to use their knowledge to solve these problems and address these challenges close to home," he said.

The funding will come from President Joe Biden's Investing in America agenda, which draws from the Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and annual appropriations.

The funding is the largest annual amount awarded through the Tribal Climate Resilience Annual Awards Program, which was established in 2011 to help tribes and tribal organizations respond to climate change. It will go toward the planning and implementation projects for climate adaptation, community-led relocation, ocean management, and habitat restoration.

The injection of federal funding is part of Biden's commitment to working with tribal nations, said Tom Perez, a senior adviser to the president, and it underscores the administration's recognition that in the past the U.S. has left too many communities behind. "We will not allow that to happen in the future," he said.

In 2022, the administration committed $135 million to 11 tribal nations to relocate infrastructure facing climate threats like wildfires, coastal erosion and extreme weather. It could cost up to $5 billion over the next 50 years to address climate-related relocation needs in tribal communities, according to a 2020 Bureau of Indian Affairs study.

WASHINGTON — 

Some U.S. states restrict Native American access to voting

Congress granted Indigenous Americans citizenship 100 years ago, but some states are passing laws making it hard for them to register to vote or access polling places. Human Rights Watch on Monday urged U.S. states to take active steps to ensure that Native Americans and other voters of color can cast their ballots this election year.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, 23 states have enacted 53 voting laws making it easier to vote. That said, at least 14 states in 2023 passed restrictive voter laws, and at least six states enacted election interference laws.

Read more:

Chippewa attorney seeks to overturn ICWA

Imprint News this week profiles a Native American attorney who spent years supporting the Indian Child Welfare Act, or ICWA, and is now working to see the law overturned.

Congress passed the ICWA in 1978 to stop states from placing Native American children in the welfare system with non-Native American families — a long-term practice Native Americans decried as an extension of historic assimilation policies.

Attorney Mark Fiddler, a citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians in Minnesota, was an avid supporter of the law — until, that is, a case he argued back in 1994: After arguing a case against an Indigenous girl’s adoption into a white home, he was troubled to see she was later cycled through dozens of Indigenous foster homes.

“In my heart of hearts, I knew that was probably not the right thing for the child. And it always nagged me,” he said. “My personal opinion is that ICWA has outlived its usefulness and causes more problems than it solves.”

Now, he is arguing a case in the Minnesota appeals court involving a pair of toddler twins who were removed from a white foster family and placed with their mother’s cousin.

Read more:

Seminole Nation attorney named to missing and murdered cases team

The U.S. Justice Department has appointed Bree R. Black Horse, an enrolled member of the Seminole Nation in Oklahoma, as an assistant United States attorney in the department’s new Missing and Murdered Indigenous People, or MMIP, regional program, assigned to prosecute such cases throughout the Northwest region — Washington, Oregon, Montana, Idaho and California.

Black Horse, a 2013 graduate of the Seattle University School of law, most recently served as an associate on the Native American Affairs team of the multinational law firm Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton. Prior to that, she was a public defender for the Yakama Nation in Washington state.

“For far too long Indigenous men, women and children have suffered violence at rates higher than many other demographics,” Black Horse said in a statement. “As I step into this role, I look forward to working with our local, state and tribal partners to identify concrete ways of reducing violence and improving public safety in Indian country and elsewhere.”

In June 2023, the Justice Department announced it would dedicate five MMIP assistant U.S. attorneys and five MMIP coordinators to provide specialized support to U.S. attorneys’ offices addressing and fighting MMIP by investigating unsolved cases and related crimes, boosting communication, coordination and collaboration among federal, tribal, state and local law enforcement and nongovernmental partners.

Black Horse will be attached to the Yakima, Washington, field office.

Read more:

Arizona hoop dancer wins top prize

Josiah Enriquez, a 21-year-old hoop dancer from the Pueblo of Pojoaque in New Mexico, has won the Heard Museum’s 2024 Hoop Dance World Championship, held in Phoenix, Arizona, beating out more than 100 other contestants.

Although its exact origin is unclear, Indigenous peoples have practiced the dance for centuries.

Dancers incorporate circular hoops into their movements and are judged for their grace and style.

Enriquez began dancing at the age of 3, and as the video below shows, he has mastered the art.

WASHINGTON — 

Ten US states control and profit from federal Indian reservation lands

It is commonly assumed that the U.S. government holds in trust all land inside Indian reservation borders for the exclusive use of tribes.

This week, High Country News and the nonprofit online news magazine Grist report that 10 state governments hold trust to 647,500 hectares (1.6 million acres) of surface and subsurface acres of lands inside 83 federal Indian reservations.

Tribes have little to no say over how the lands are used, and state-run mining, grazing, logging and leasing generate millions of dollars that are used to support non-Indigenous agencies such as public schools, prisons or universities.

In 1887, Congress passed the General Allotment Act, or Dawes Act, carving up reservations into smaller parcels that were doled out to families and individuals. The remaining land — about 36,400,000 hectares (90 million acres) — was sold or opened up to U.S. states, settlers and federal projects such as state parks.

States are legally obliged to make money from state trust lands, so there is no incentive for them to turn land back over to tribes “without something in exchange.” Some tribes, such as the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes in Montana, have negotiated land back. Others have purchased land back a parcel at a time.

Read more:

ProPublica focuses on museums that got a head start on NAGPRA compliance

As part of its ongoing series examining institutions’ failure to comply with the 1990 Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, ProPublica reports this week on two museums that have met most or all their obligations under NAGPRA, which forbids federally funded institutions from retaining human remains and artifacts without permission from tribes.

They are the Museum of Us in San Diego, California, and the History Colorado Center in Denver, both of which got an earlier start than other institutions in cataloging their holdings and consulting with tribes on how remains and funerary artifacts should be managed and repatriated.

In 2018, three decades after NAGPRA was passed, the Museum of Us — then known as the San Diego Museum of Man — released new “Colonial Pathways” guidelines, acknowledging that it had “long prevented the return of cultural resources to Indigenous communities.”

At the time, the museum estimated that at least 80% of its 75,000 “ethnographic items” would require consultation with descendant tribal communities. The museum admitted that it had “long prevented the return of cultural resources to Indigenous communities.”

That process is ongoing, but in Denver, the History Colorado Center has already repatriated all items subject to NAGPRA. It also loans items back out to tribes on request and allows tribes to change their minds and reclaim items.

Read more:

Editorial: Repatriation does not erase Native Americans’ cultures

In an opinion piece this week, Native News Online editor Levi Rickert writes that while museums are making moves to comply with NAGPRA, he believes some “conservative columnists, politicians and benefactors” are pushing back against revised regulations that require them to obtain tribal or lineal descendants’ consent before exhibiting or conducting research on human remains and related cultural items.

“Since 1492, non-Natives have continually sought to research, examine and showcase our continent’s Indigenous peoples,” Rickert writes. “This fascination led to museums collecting hundreds of thousands of Native cultural artifacts and the remains of deceased Indigenous people — also known as our ancestors.”

He notes that while museums are making moves to comply with NAGPRA’s updated rules, some conservatives criticize the rules as part of the so-called “woke” or liberal political agenda and accuse the Interior Department of erasing Indigenous history.

“If conservative columnists, politicians and benefactors truly want to ensure that Native Americans are not erased, they should stop 'fixating on our ancestors’ bones” and instead focus on honoring treaties and funding health care and education to ensure Native Americans can live 'in modest prosperity.'”

Read the editorial here:

Portrait of 18th-century Mohawk diplomat scores big at auction

An engraved portrait of early Mohawk leader Ho Nee Yeath Taw No Riow fetched nearly $39,000 at auction on Sunday. Engraved by London printmaker John Faber the Elder, it depicts a sachem also known as John of Canajoharie (New York), who was one of a delegation of four Haudenosaunee political representatives who in 1709 set sail for London to negotiate an alliance against the French in the Great Lakes region.

In London, the so-called “Four Kings” — three Mohawk sachems and a Mahican — were wined, dined and celebrated in style.

The engraving was part of an extensive collection of prints by Old Masters collected by wealthy 19th-century Arlington, Massachusetts, citizen Winfield Robbins. Fearing that photography would eventually replace the Old World arts of printmaking, Robbins spent years abroad amassing a collection of tens of thousands of prints and other works of art.