Happening on the grounds in tribal communities and more International Experiences around repatriation. Our third panel will be chaired today by Roberta Bobby connor, a member of the confederated tribes, director of the cultural institute. Since its opening in 1980. Bobby is a former trustee of the Smithsonian Museum of American Indian and chairman of the board and its been my great pleasure to have a few years working with her. She is an amazing and thoughtful advocate, critic, intellectual around the practice of museums and museumology particularly in native country. The conversations ive had with bobby over the years have been so enlightening, ive learned an incredible amount from her about how things operate on the ground, in her own very fine institution, but also her kind of picture of the National Scene and about the mission of museums in Indian Country. So bobby, its wonderful to have you here. Its my pleasure to see you and spend time with you and i will turn things over to your panel. Good day. Here, most people know me by bobbi. And before i introduce the copanelists, id like to engage the room participation, and for those on the cspan audience how many of you are representing a tribe or a Historic Preservation office in Indian Country . Could you please raise your hand . And how many of you are representing agencies or museums who do businesses with tribes over repatriation in particular . Wow, ok. Well, Indian Country, were used to being outnumbered, right . [laughter] so if the panelists were to retitle this panel, i think it would be the Untold Stories of repatriation and i hope that thats where we will get to when we get to the questions, as well as the presentations of this panel. But id like to just for claritys sake to start off with my experience with the confederated tribes of humantilla, which is my home tribe to, indicate we have a division of labor in our tribe and how we handle our work. The Cultural ResourceProtection Program is the tribal Historic Preservation office and officer in that department of natural resources. And they deal with all things having to do with repatriation not only of human remains but associated objects and all other relationships under that as well as the nmai act. They deal with ground disturbance and monitoring. The Museum Cultural institute has a specific job of interpretation and curation. And our tribe elders thought it best that those who were dealing with the public on a daytoday basis, gathering stories to be told to the public and engaging the public on a as a routine part of our business, should not be the people doing the repatriation work with human remains in particular. So our museum has been a repository in our sacred storage vault for a select number of special holdings that were temporary and we have permanent or semipermanent storage for some archeological material, but we have made it a practice because we are a public facility, to separate that in our tribe. And to make the work of those dealing with the public exclusively that. So the museum deals with curation, and its about repatriation of knowledge, and thats been through symposia and our own tribal history back and the less history book and soon our native place names to be published. My work with repatriation has been largely six years on the board of trustees for the National Museum, and i want to just emphasize for those of you who were here this morning, i think you heard a very thoughtful presentation by both those peoples representing the National Museum of Natural History and the National Museum of the American Indian, but i think that those of you who are working on repatriation have had very different experiences, good and bad with both institutions. You know how it is when sort of not the rubber meets the road but when the moccasins hit the trail, how hard it can be in practice to do this work, and you are the people who have the very difficult job of not only all of the logistics and the politics of handling repatriation, you have the responsibility of taking care of your own personal, physical, spiritual and emotional well , being while you do this work on behalf of our people in Indian Country. So i want to applaud you for the work do you and i want to face say to you that these are people who know what the trail is like and theyre going to talk to you now about that experience. So i am delighted to woman as them to welcome as the panelists for this presentation on the broader context context someone who has 25 years of practical experience in this field. He was putting his office together before the nmai act, or nedpra were enacted, and has been doing this work for 25 years and were optimistic possibly another 10. To his left, and i dont say that because of Health Reasons or anything in particular, but because its hard work, and to his left is don simonas who is representing the bureau of Land Management and has about 20 years of experience working in repatriation as well and they have some very specific experiences they want to share with you today. With no further ado, id like to introduce you to lee. Thank you. [applause] first of all, thanks to the museum, in particular, the staff that im sure that did the planning and handled logistics for all of us here, kudos to them, and im sure youre glad that today is the day, and maybe youll sleep tonight. [laughter] my name is lee. As introduced, ive been the director of the hopi tribe Preservation Office for 25 years and this coming march will be 26 years. So its been a pretty interesting journey for me personally being the first and only director for the tribes preservation efforts. What id like to do briefly here is to share my personal experience within the theme thats being presented today, which is repatriation. And we had lunch together, and i talked to both of my colleagues here about some of my personal perspectives in retrospect, and id like to share those with you, and sometimes call it really the Untold Stories or story about repatriation. About 1990, i was notified initially by a Small College in Southern California of them hold ing two infants from a hopi ancestral site, about 70 something miles south of the hopi reservation. And you know, of course, i had very little experience then and for the first time, i was really faced with a cultural dilemma as to how to deal with a burial much less infants, because culturally, we deal with infants differently than we do deal with adult. And i had absolutely no idea how to handle it. So being that i was the assistant director for the Tribal Health department for 10 years prior, i had also established a cadre of older people, so i sought advice from them, and i think in Indian Country, that was the same dilemma of facing even my older generation advisors. Because we didnt have a reburial ceremony. We just collectively didnt know how to deal with it. But they finally said, well, its the most ethical thing we can do to place these two back into their final resting homes. So they at that time established or at least i was witness to just an abbreviated ceremony for the two infants, and we buried them. Since then, our effort from the hopi tribe has been particularly focused on human remains. Were slowly transitioning into the sacred objects and culture cultural patrimony objects, both with the statutes, under the guides of the smithsonian or this museum. We just recently completed repatriation and reburial over at the national forest. And facing me ultimately at the time, institutions began to share their inventories with us. It was overwhelming as we looked at the collections out there that would eventually be potentially be affiliated with the hopi tribe. The paper on it was just that, it was daunting. As we engaged in discussions and eventually began to actually do collections and repatriation of burial of human remains, that became another cultural challenge to all of us, and to me personally, and for the first time you know, of course, we were now going to handle remains, and i remember the first big collection we were going to deal with, and that was up in like 2005 with the mesa verde. And up at mesa verde, we were going to rebury about 1500 individuals. The logistical end of it was a task that me and my staff worked out in terms of deciding on a common cemetery and the sequencing of and the distribution of the remains based on the cultural practices. I remember going into the trench and the boxes being delivered to us and opening up me and some others opening up the boxes, and now time to actually handle them. And i vividly remember that, all of us, and it was a couple of trucks full of the remains. And you know, initially, and even then back in 2005, as i went in through that burial and other burials before, reburials, i went in there learning about the history of collections, and then actually seeing the remains come out, and having now placing them in their designated areas and i went in there with perhaps probably as many tribal people do, with mixed emotions and particularly one that i always think about even today is really anger, and particularly when you looked at the types of remains that you are handling. You have the typical adults, female, male, perhaps what was more distressing for me was infants, and because like i said, we treat infants differently out on hopi, and they are considered to be in their purest form of human life untainted, both physically and emotionally, so we see the infants as clouds, cloud people. So when i began to handle those kinds of collections, that i dwelt on that, and, of course, learning the history of collections, its anger. Also, mother and infant were really hard to deal with. And probably the most visibly affecting were mummies. And as we engaged in particular with the mesa verde reburial there was about a dozen of the mummies. I didnt really have that organized as to how to deal with that, with the hopi group that went up there. But when i mentioned it to them, no one wanted to handle the mummies. So i handled the mummies. I think visually, they were the most affecting. And even though we end up with our cleansing ceremony, our smudging, Everything Else that we do today with dead, i think those kind of imagery on a personal level, just simply lingers. Over time, you kind of dont dwell on it and dont think about it. But even now today when you bring it up, its there again. So while repatriation is good in many ways, in the case of human remains, the respectful reinterment back to earth, but also this kind of trauma that many tribes just simply dont talk about, and its really unknown as to what really repatriation means or how it affects tribes. Same thing with the sacred objects of repatriation. In 1995, we visited the museum at harvard. For the first time, the staff had us put on these protective clothing, full gear, our shoes were covered, gloves, everything and that was the first time we have ever were required to do that. So after that day, we sat around at our hotel room just wondering why they did have us do what they did with the clothing. So next day, we went in and we asked about it, and for the first time, they shared with us of the potential contamination of some of the hopi objects with pesticides. So i didnt really understand that immediate information, but over time, we know that many institutions, in particular, museums, use pesticides to treat biodegradable items from insects. And as we went into the study of the application of pesticides, we also knew that my institution was pretty random. Few museums had any records on the application of pesticides, item by item. No one kept records of it. But it was important enough that the next day, i asked to see the museum director, and i asked her about this potential problem. I wanted to just sit down and talk about it, and it seems that immediately there was not any kind of real reaction in terms of urgency and so forth from the Club Director from the director. So i asked to see the museum attorney. So reluctantly, he met with me and i said to him, you know, your museum has to cooperate with the hopi tribe. You know, i think were facing a major, major problem here. And we need to know if were going to repatriate, we need to know, and again, it seems that he wasnt receiving me the way i expected. So i finally said, you know, its a matter of legal liability. If you know, but more importantly, if you knowingly prevent any information from learning more about this problem, its a matter of legal liability on your part is what i told him. So that triggered off, of course, discussion and later they did invest in Laboratory Testing of some of our items and for the first time, i was beginning to understand the depth and breadth of this particular problem. You know, arsenic, the base chemical, one item was really high. You know, the intent of repatriation is to have the cultures receive these Cultural Properties for reuse. And so with that first project we knew that this was going to be a very significant agenda for the hopi tribe. So in 1997, weve applied for a nagpra grant and under took a Testing Program of about 60 items that were already returned to the hopi tribe. And the results were in line with the service. One item we got from the field museum in chicago tested 500 times the acceptable apa the e. P. A. Level. It was so deadly. But you know, the sad part of it was we had brought it home and given it to the clan people that were responsible for it, they had it in their home. They were handling the item that we didnt know. And that item still is in isolation, you know, the laboratory and one of them that worked with us is here. Dr. John mcclenan, i dont know where he is at, but he and his team with the Arizona State museum helped us with the arizona poison control center, and they told us, you know, it if it was our property we , would incinerate it. So i hope you never ask to get this one back. Its so deadly. By 1998, the chairman of the hopi tribe issued a moratorium on repatriation. He said we are not returning any more items unless theyre tested and free of pesticides, and that has been our protocol since then. So i remember going into the villages with the first collection 65, and letting the villagers and priest, the village chief, and people know that were getting our coconino friends back from certain museums. There was a lot of joy. There was a lot of exuberance, and when we did return them, it was a big day for the villages. And then by 1996, i was going back telling them, i got to retrieve them. Ive got to take them back. And, of course, i had to tell them that potential problem of pesticides. And you could see just the i dont know, they just didnt understand the problem. And so now the tribe is Still Holding a lot that tested positive for particularly heavy metals and in particular arsenic. All of them are down in the repository, the National Parks repository in tuscon, probably never to be returned or used by the hopi people. So thats an untold story. In september, we worked with staff here at the museum and filed a claim in 1998, but they also underwent some delays for certain reasons, but one of them was to make sure they were tested. September 27th, was a huge day for some of the staff present here, jackie swift and terry snoble, lauren, and others. 95 of our friends were being returned home from the museum. It was a big day for the hopi people. I think six villages had items being returned, and i remember we had some of the coconino friends out in our Conference Room there, and asked the tribal employees to come over and pay homage to them with prayer and so forth. A lot of emotion. But within the collection, we also knew there were 23 items from the museum that were tested positive for arsenic and heavy metals. Those will never again be distributed. They are still boxed up. They are going to be housed at the museum of Northern Arizona thanks to my friend whos been very helpful. We dont have any repository or any Holding Facilities on hopi. While it was good in a number of ways, of course, the whole issue of pesticides, and hopi is at the forefront with this issue, and i keep asking the park service if they could at least consider a temporary moratorium on biodegradable items and work work with the museums and tribes so that all the tribes have an opportunity to get resources for their own Testing Programs. Even as a speak today, many items are being returned untested to tribes all over the United States. And i worry about it. We are still aggressive in our work, making sure that everything we are repatriating is tested. And we have a cooperative relationship with various institutions to achieve that. So, really, repatriation, we are going into sacred objects in terms of repatriation. Over time, human remains, with repatriation, the hopi tribe will have reburied 7000 human remains over 25 years. We will have reburied 15,000 objects. And the hopi tribe is the agent for all the pueblos when it comes to working out the paperwork, the repatriation agreements, all the logistics. Using that, the pueblos have asked the hopi tribe to represent them. We have not had any human remains regarding laguna pueblo. We represent them for human remains. As i look back, 7000 is a huge number. Probably the single largest repatriation of human remains. So, our ancestral people are now in the ground. And we have worked out protocols with multi use agencies so that we can reburied on those jurisdictions as well. It has been a pretty interesting task as far as r