More Than 3,000 Native American Remains Held in Missouri Have Not Been Returned

MISSOURI – Nearly 3,300 Native American remains once unearthed in Missouri are still awaiting repatriation to their respective tribes, even though a law from decades ago dictates their return. These remains are spread across thirty-eight establishments ranging from Utah to New York City. However, a significant portion of them, more than 2,270 ancestors, resides within the University of Missouri’s Museum of Anthropology. Additionally, nearly 200 remains are kept at the Missouri Department of Transportation.

This information comes from the National Park Service, responsible for overseeing the repatriation process. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), enacted in 1990, obligates institutions receiving federal aid to catalog and repatriate Indigenous remains. However, the execution of this law has faced delays for years.

The 1990 NAGPRA law compels various entities, including colleges and museums, to send back Native American ancestors to their tribes. Regrettably, this mandate’s enforcement has been sluggish.

The process’s complexity stems from a dearth of records, making it hard to determine which remains correspond to which tribe. Financial constraints, intricate bureaucratic processes, and Missouri’s prejudiced history towards Native Americans further complicate matters. Historically, tribes were coerced into moving to Kansas and Oklahoma.

Moreover, in 1839, Missouri decreed it unlawful for an Indigenous person to be in the state without written authorization from a federal agent, according to Greg Olson, author of “Indigenous Missourians: Ancient Societies to the Present.” The absence of established reservations makes interactions between local institutions and tribes from other states more challenging and sluggish after the NAGPRA was introduced.

“To have to be forced away from your home and leave your relatives behind, that was really, really painful for them,” Olson said. “And then to compound that pain, other people would come behind and dig them up and put them in museums or whatever. So I think it’s important for healing that the different Indigenous tribes be able to get those ancestors back and to have a say in what becomes of where they end up resting.”

Several institutions have made progress, with repatriations planned for the upcoming year. This includes an ancestor, currently with the Kansas City Museum after being taken from Platte County, set to be returned to the Pawnee Tribe in Oklahoma. Additionally, around 500 ancestors discovered near three Missouri lakes are also slated for repatriation.

“To see them finally reburied, that’s a blessing,” said Marti Only A Chief, the NAGPRA officer for the Pawnee Tribe. “That way they’re just not sitting on a shelf.”

Evidence indicates that indigenous groups inhabited areas near the Missouri River, now part of Riverside, as early as 5000 B.C.E. Studies of the land suggest the presence of a structure, likely a hub for social and ceremonial gatherings, within a village that housed roughly 100 residents at any point. Most inhabitants lived up to around 35 years, as per Gary Brenner, whose family once owned a portion of this Platte County site. The deceased were interred in mounds made of either soil or stones.

By the 1870s, grave diggings commenced, driven by individuals seeking what they perceived as “treasures,” Brenner noted. His intrigue in archaeology blossomed in 1979, when he delved into the land’s history through stories from his great-great aunt. Over the years, Brenner amassed a collection of artifacts, such as arrowheads and pottery shards.

In 1937, the Smithsonian Institution orchestrated the area’s inaugural professional excavation, unearthing bones, tools, and stone relics. A teenage individual’s remains were exhumed in 1954 during a collaborative project between the Kansas City Museum, the University of Missouri, and the Kansas City Archaeological Society. Fast forward to July 2022, the museum initiated a dialogue with the Pawnee Tribe to repatriate the teenager’s remains, with the actual repatriation slated for the following spring. Though the Pawnee didn’t originally reside in Missouri, they frequented the region for hunting expeditions.

Beyond Platte County, Only A Chief highlighted that the Pawnee also had connections to Atchison, Buchanan, Clay, Jackson, and Polk counties in Missouri. This repatriation marks the state’s first such instance.

“I believe everybody is starting to understand that we want our relatives back and we want to give them a proper burial,” she said.

Reburials take place on tribal grounds in Nebraska.

The museum’s collections curator, Lisa Shockley, stated that the ancestors “do not belong in a box in my storeroom.”

“I will take care of them while they are here,” she said. “But it’s not where they belong. It’s not my fault they’re here, but I’m really sorry they’re here and I want to try and make it right.”

Brenner assisted in converting the property into a city park after being chosen for the Riverside City Council in the 1980s. A tiny memorial honoring the location of the village was dedicated in 1987. He has conflicting feelings about what will happen to Indigenous remains.

“Archaeologists should be allowed to gather all the information they can and then give it to whoever needs it so it can be property interred,” he said.

At times, Brenner mentioned, it’s unclear which tribe the remains belong to. However, he candidly added, “I don’t want someone looking at my skull under a piece of glass.”

In the coming year, the Kansas City Museum is set to repatriate remains to the Atka Tribe located in Alaska. These remains, accompanied by a potential bear tooth serving as a funerary artifact, were retrieved from Amchitka Island by an American G.I. during the Second World War and subsequently given to the museum. The island, a segment of the Aleutian Islands, has remained desolate since its use for nuclear weapons tests by the U.S. in the 1960s and 70s.

James Stevens, the tribal administrator representing the Atka Tribe based in Atka Island, southwest Alaska, shared that Shockley approached him in March to commence the repatriation proceedings. Reflecting on repatriation, Stevens remarked that while some harbored lingering resentment, there’s an undeniable sense of solace accompanying the process.

“It means a lot to get these remains back,” he said.

The Museum of Anthropology at Mizzou has returned the remains of 150 individuals to six tribal nations, as shared by the museum’s director, Candace Sall. The museum has assigned six staff members, with two joining this semester, to exclusively focus on repatriation endeavors. Emphasizing their close collaboration with tribes at every juncture, Sall noted the unique expertise required in bone identification and comprehending historical geographical distributions.

As she put it, even a single year can be pivotal in this context. To illustrate, the affiliation of a tribe to certain remains might hinge on whether they were in a specific location during events like the Trail of Tears. This tragic event in the 1830s saw various Native American groups being coercively uprooted from their ancestral lands and resettled westward to Oklahoma.

Of all institutions, Mizzou holds the most significant collection of Missouri’s remains, totaling 2,274, along with 7,735 associated funerary objects. The majority of these are believed to originate from between 500 to 1450 C.E.

“Each person is handled carefully and individually,” Sall said, adding that they are kept in a special chamber that only particular employees with clearance can access.

500 of these ancestors came from the regions near the Truman, Stockton, and Pomme de Terre lakes, and the museum will have meetings in December and January to discuss their repatriation, according to Sall.

“NAGPRA work is human rights work,” she said. “We are working to get these individuals back to their Tribal Nations. It’s a slow process done with sensitivity.”

The connections the museum has made through its involvement with NAGPRA have had further beneficial effects.

“It’s changed how we do our museum exhibits, so we work with the tribes to put out objects and use their language in the exhibits and to present their stories by working with them,” Sall said. “And so that’s been really helpful on the museum side going forward that we’re able to tell me the tribe’s stories with the tribe.”

The Osage Nation’s NAGPRA coordinator, Sarah O’Donnell, stated that the tribe is actively in contact with Mizzou and that they “find the University of Missouri-Columbia’s current NAGPRA efforts to be in keeping with Osage Nation’s wishes.”

The tribe is currently collaborating “with multiple Missouri institutions to conduct respectful repatriations, with each at varying degrees of NAGPRA compliance.” Other state agencies holding Indigenous remains are the Missouri Department of Natural Resources and the Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT).

Per data from the National Park Service, MoDOT holds 196 remains, making it the state transportation agency with the highest number of Indigenous remains in the U.S. In comparison, the California Department of Transportation has 69, Illinois possesses 142, and Texas has seven. These ancestors in Missouri were excavated during infrastructure projects like road and bridge constructions from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, explained Linda Horn, a representative for MoDOT.

Following the enactment of a 1987 state law concerning unmarked burials, any human remains discovered by MoDOT were entrusted to the Department of Natural Resources. Horn further elaborated that MoDOT has engaged with Tribal Nations for over ten years and began more “active” collaboration in 2018 regarding repatriation.

“The tribes asked for additional work to be done with the remains to further identify and classify them, and that work is completed,” Horn said.

The company will then post notices about its inventory on a government website. The posting of those is not subject to any deadline. To date, the department has not finished any repatriations.