Goal is to return Indian remains

Monday, March 14, 2005
By DAN LAMOTHE

AMHERST - More than 170 years after some of them were seized from sacred resting places, human remains of more than 100 American Indians held at the University of Massachusetts soon may be returned to the tribes that laid them to rest.

At least that's the hope of the Five College Repatriation Committee, a group of about a dozen academics from UMass, Amherst and Smith colleges - three institutions that once infuriated local Indian tribes by excavating sacred burial sites in the name of science.

Working in consultation with local tribes, committee members say they are identifying an extensive collection of American Indian materials, including Indian remains, funerary objects and sacred artifacts.

Their goal is repatriation of the sacred remains and objects to numerous American Indian communities that in a different era flourished by living off the fruits of the Connecticut River Valley's fertile land.

"These remains, to us, are not just bones," said Donna L. Moody, a West Hartford, Vt., woman with Abenaki tribal roots. She represents a group of New England tribes in discussions with campus officials.

"There is spirit attached to them, and in some ways, they're still living ancestors. It's just a horrible situation."

If the names of the tribes affected by the excavations sound common, it's because they show up in the names of roads, towns and cities across the region.

Among those represented in the collection are the Agawam, Woronoco, Pocumtuck and Nonotuck, all bands of the Eastern Abenaki once common across New England, said Margaret M. Bruchac, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts who is involved in the project.

Bruchac, a Northampton resident who traces her roots to the Missiquoi Abenaki tribe based primarily in Vermont, said the excavations took place mainly between the 1830s and 1960s. The digging was widely covered by the news media and took place in communities that included Northampton, Deerfield, Hadley and Montague.

"They convinced themselves that these Indians had no living relatives, and that's how they were able to go about this," said Bruchac. "The idea was that the Indians were dead, gone, and all that remained were these native remains."

Bruchac and her fellow committee members say that attempting to retrace the history of the items is complicated by haphazard practices that sometimes included separation of items recovered at the same site.

The sites were excavated chiefly by two prominent local professors, said Bruchac - Harris Hawthorne Wilder, a pioneer in forensics at Smith College in the early 1900s; and Edward Hitchcock Jr., a popular professor at Amherst College for 60 years who was known to many as "Old Doc."

Hitchcock gathered together his collection in 1857 at the Gilbert Museum of Indian Relics that he founded. It included more than 1,000 skeletal remains and artifacts found locally. It eventually was complemented by thousands of donated objects from as far away as Florida and Utah.

At Smith, Wilder added to a collection of remains and artifacts at the Smith Anthropological and Zoological Museum that he founded in 1914. His additions included objects from an excavation in North Hadley that turned up numerous relatives of Quonquont , a famous Nonotuck sachem, or tribal leader, said Bruchac.

By the 1980s, nearly all of the collections at Amherst and Smith were shipped to the anthropology department at UMass, which had better facilities to store the materials, said Robert W. Paynter, a UMass anthropology professor.

Anthropologists there noted that poor identification practices and storage techniques made it difficult to tell the tribal identity and place of origin for most of the remains.

"We've got this tangled, not well understood relationship, and it takes a while to sort it out," said Paynter, who chairs the UMass portion of the project.

Donald Joralemon, chairman of the Five College Repatriation Committee, said Smith and Amherst both have acknowledged responsibility for many of the excavations, and are working with UMass anthropologists to expedite the return of the remains to tribal communities.

"We decided early on that this shouldn't be dealt with institution by institution, but that we should do it as a shared responsibility," said Joralemon, an anthropologist at Smith.

Nationwide, remains of more than 30,000 American Indians have been repatriated, or legally returned, to various tribes in the last 15 years. But Bruchac and Paynter said a timetable for the Five College effort is unclear due to a variety of factors.

Before remains and related items can be returned, a complete identification of the collection's items and consultation with all tribes involved must be carried out, said Bruchac, who acts as a liaison between the repatriation committee and tribal groups.

Since nearly all the local tribes involved are not federally recognized, the Five College committee must then present its findings to a review committee created by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, federal legislation enacted in 1990 that many American Indians consider a landmark.

While the law provides only for return of remains to federally recognized tribes, Bruchac said it shouldn't be a problem to repatriate to tribes like the Pocumtuck that lack federal recognition. However, many institutions with remains, including the Springfield Science Museum, have never done that.

Ellen R. Savulis, an anthropologist at the Springfield Science Museum, said the museum has repatriated to 12 federally recognized tribes over the last 10 years, including the Navajo, Seneca, Wamponoag and Narragansett.

Bruchac said the extra steps to work with unrecognized tribes are worth it to the Five College committee, which is "trying to make things right and repair some of the damage that has been done" to American Indian communities.

"The real success story here is that we really have a number of colleges and institutions that are willing to work with these tribal groups and work it through," she said.

Moody said the repatriation process remains an extremely emotional and spiritual one for tribal communities such as those she represents. But, she said she is encouraged by the way things have gone so far in the Five College effort.

"They've been very good about accommodating suggestions and our needs. I think it's been a good process."

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