On May 5, the largest collection of Aboriginal remains will be officially handed over to Australia’s Ngarrindjeri people – including remains recently returned from the Royal College of Surgeons in London and Edinburgh University. Since 2001, a working group in the UK has met to decide the future of old bones in British cultural and scientific institutions. While the focus of repatriation is on moral and sacred grounds, Tiffany Jenkins, director of Arts and Society at the Institute of Ideas, argues that valuable information about humanity could risk being lost.
A committee has met behind closed doors in London over the last two years to decide the future of old bones in British cultural and scientific institutions. Their deliberations and decision will have consequences for all of us. The skeletons in the closets could tell us about history, humanity and our health, if only we would let them.
There is a growing feeling amongst many in the museum profession that old human remains should be returned to where they were originally found. Tony Blair raised the issue of repatriation in 2000 when he agreed to increase efforts to send back remains from Australian indigenous communities. The Department for Culture Media and Sport subsequently set up a working group to examine the issue and consider how the law might be changed to allow institutions to repatriate all human remains.
The working group is made up of a few lawyers, museums professionals and anthropologists, among them Dr Neil Chalmers, director of The Natural History Museum; Norman Palmer, Professor of Commercial Law at University College London, and Tristram Besterman, director of the Manchester University Museum, who was until recently the convenor of the Museums Association Ethics Committee.
The group was asked to examine the legal status of human remains in the collections of publicly funded Museums and Galleries in the UK and the powers of these institutions to deaccession the remains. They had to consider the desirability of deaccession, the form of changes in legislation that would be necessary, and a statement of principles for guidance. The group will also make recommendations on how to include non-human remains associated with human remains in these changes.
The group is expected to issue recommendations to government soon. The main suggestion will be the relaxation of laws that currently prevent institutions from parting with bones. Overall it will advocate the return, for moral reasons, of skeletons presently held in national collections.
The bones are evidence from the past that speak to us about life from between one century to many thousands of years ago. Under scrutiny they reveal patterns of migration, the effect of environment upon body form, and the relationship between different populations. We can learn who lived where and when, about patterns in health, origin, gene flow and microevolutionary change
When the law changes, large and significant collections could be broken up and sent away. A survey by the committee found human remains from all over the world in more than sixty British museums. The Natural History Museum, for example, has a broad collection of at least twenty thousand remains that are used extensively by scientists for comparative research. University collections include those held at Edinburgh and Cambridge.
If returned, the collections will probably be treated as sacred and then buried. This has already happened in similar cases, and the likelihood that it will continue was reinforced at the annual conference for the Museum Association. The keynote speech was given by Rodney Dillon, a Tasmanian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commissioner who travels the world campaigning for the return of old aboriginal skeletons. Speaking to a welcoming audience Dillon proclaimed, ‘We take pride in our people’s past. Without our remains where they should be, buried where they belong, we can’t cope. People are walking around with their heads down as their ancestors are not there.’
The pending ruling won’t remove all the material, of course. Not every group wants the remains returned, and in some situations no link can be found to any group at all. Some remains are of no research value, so there is no reason for them to be in a lab collecting dust. And research may well continue around the world. But on the whole it is likely that some of the most crucial material about humanity will be lost.
America has gone further down this path and indicates what could happen in the UK. In 1990, NAGPRA (the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) set new criteria for who should make the decisions regarding the disposition of human remains and artefacts. It is a mandate for researchers and museums to return all human remains to their closest hereditary or cultural descendants. The descendants decide the future of the bones whether they throw them into the sea, examine them, or bury them six feet under.
There has been a steady impact upon collections. Museums backed by government have sent back vital collections and remains, most of which have been covered in soil. It is estimated that the Smithsonian alone has transferred more than 3,335 sets of human remains. In 1999 the Peabody Museum based at Harvard University returned remains of nearly two thousand individuals to the Pecos and Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico.
The Pecos were at their peak between 1300 and 1600 and ruled over a trade path between the Pueblo farmers of the Rio Grande and tribes of the buffalo plains. The bones have been studied since their discovery in 1915. The collection was the largest available skeletal population from a single community and was large enough to be statistically significant. As a result we have learned about the influence of diet and disease on populations. We know more about osteoporosis, head injuries, and the development of dental cavities. This was brought to an end upon return of the collection when the bones were covered in earth. We can learn nothing further from these bones.
The Kennewick Man found on a riverbank in Washington state in 1996 is one of the most important skeletons to be found, but it cannot at present be examined. Initial radiocarbon samples showed the bones to be around 9,500 years old, proving the skeleton to be of Paleo-Indian age, and one of the oldest prehistoric individuals to be found in North America. Preliminary analysis suggested the bones were not American Indian but possibly European. Before further research could be done the bones were confiscated. Under NAGPRA any human remains found in North American that predate Columbus (1492), no matter how old the bones are, are considered American Indian.
The case has been contested by anthropologists who have gone from court to court asking to be allowed to examine the skeleton. Early this year a federal judge denied the motion that had put their investigations on hold. Scientists and historians held their breath eager to start work only to have their hopes dashed a month later with another court hearing blocking the study of the bones. Eight years after the discovery of an amazing piece of history, it still cannot be investigated.
Legislation backing the right of one group to decide prevents us all from ever finding out more, or challenging what we think we know. In the name of protecting ancient and sacred beliefs, what ought to be a rational legal system is blocking the furthering of our knowledge of humanity.
At the heart of the battle is the idea that a group identity owns the sole rights to investigate the past and can prevent all others from doing so. Yet the very idea of fixed groupings and cultural continuity over thousands of years is a flawed supposition. The history of human beings is not one of separate and permanent cultures, but one of continual migration, amalgamation, fission and disintegration. Neither people nor language, and certainly not geographic location remain stable for more than a small period of time. The idea that there is a clear link to thousands of years ago is fundamentally wrong. It also advances notions of fixed and separate races that should not be tolerated today. These are ideas that science and a rational understanding of history have proven incorrect.
The idea that one group should dictate to others what can and cannot be investigated is a serious and dangerous problem for all. The collections should belong to the world rather than any one group. That one group can censor and obscure access to knowledge on the basis of an identity from hundreds or thousands of years ago, is seriously wrong and threatens the future of ideas and understanding.
At last years Museums Association conference, Rodney Dillon exclaimed in his keynote address, ‘We have no clean water, there is petrol sniffing and crime is rife.’ It was a moving speech that filled me with outrage. But he used this terrible situation to argue that the bones should be returned and buried. ‘It is no good worrying about the future, we need to think about the past,’ he claimed.
Destroying history, understanding, and knowledge is not the solution to the very serious problems of this community. Indeed there is a great danger in rooting today’s pressing problems in the bones from thousands of years ago. The current circumstances of aborigines need to change in the here and now. Worrying about the past only obscures the nature and urgency of the problems.
The UK working group is eager to send the bones back. Members admit their recommendations will be “anti-scientific” but those in the nervous and unconfident museum profession welcome an opportunity to improve their image. They feel that they can benefit from this gesture. At a recent meeting on the bones someone from the Heritage Lottery Fund declared we ‘need to understand the spiritual role of these objects and sacred artefacts that can help us find our place.’ It seems that many are turning their backs on the scientific project of making new discoveries, and instead want to find new meaning in old myths.
Secrets at our fingertips about the past are being covered up. The opportunity to explore and ask questions of our ancestors, to reaffirm or challenge conventional views, to evaluate what we discover against what we have been led to believe, is at stake. Those in charge of cultural institutions should not turn their backs on their responsibility to honour access to knowledge, for the sake of humanity’s past and all our futures.
Arts Hub will publish a feature looking at both sides of this issue in the coming week. The IoI is holding a debate, Human Remains: Objects to study or ancestors to bury?, on May 2. CLICK HERE for details..
Permission to run this article, which is also published on the Butterflies and Wheels website, was kindly granted by the author.
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