Here’s former Larsen Bay resident and Alutiiq Museum executive director April Laktonen Counceller:
“It was the first time where our people really began to understand why it was so important to have control over our own cultural heritage and by extension, our ancestral remains,” Counceller said. “It took years and lots of lawyers.”
That repatriation request process began in 1987, and hundreds of those ancestors were put to rest in 1991.
The Smithsonian repatriation isn’t covered under NAGPRA. Instead the Smithsonian based its policy on a 1989 law that authorized the National Museum of the American Indian.
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One of the criticisms of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act is that it puts a huge burden of proof on Tribes who may not have access to the necessary records.
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In early 2021, the Harvard Peabody Museum issued a statement apologizing for its reluctance working with Tribes to return some remains and funerary objects.
The social unrest of 2020 reignited the conversation of returning ancestral remains and sacred objects to their people.
Since contact, Indigenous people and settlers have had a contentious relationship, particularly as settlers appropriated items from traditional Native homelands. These items include totem poles, funerary and cultural objects – even remains of Indigenous ancestors.
Examples include in the late 1800s when the Edward Harriman Expedition removed a Teikweidi memorial pole from Southeast Alaska (1899). Or when anthropologist Aleš Hrdlička, a Czech-born anthropologist in the early 1900s known for unorthodox collection methods , such as stripping decomposing flesh from bones, or discarded the remains of an infant found in a cradleboard and sent it to the American Museum of Natural History.
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âAnd the whole Earth,â chimed in his 6-year-old brother, Jared.
Saturday was Clean-Up Day, and the Alvarez family, including mom, Johanna, and sister, 4-year-old Lidia, decided to spruce up the neighborhood near their church.
They found cigars, napkins, cardboard, shopping bags and face masks. The childrenâs father, Ken, carried the telltale yellow Clean-Up Day bag.
With the blue sky, warm temperatures and passersby honking their horns in support, it made for happy work for dozens of people around Fairbanks. The annual collective action results in tons of litter removed from neighborhoods and roadsides in time for summer.
Last year, Clean-Up Day volunteers collected 10.5 tons of trash in the Fairbanks North Star Borough. The goal this year is 17 tons or the equivalent to the weight of a school bus.