Museums closed their Native American exhibits 6 months ago. Tribes are still waiting to get their artifacts back

NEW YORK — Nestled in the vast Native American halls of the American Museum of Natural History is a small wooden doll that holds a sacred place among the tribes whose territories once included Manhattan.

For more than six months now, the ceremonial Ohtas, or being dolls, have been hidden from view after the museum and others nationwide took drastic measures to block or cover exhibits in response to new federal rules requiring institutions to return sacred or culturally significant objects to tribes — or at least obtain consent to display or study them.

The doll, also called Nahneetis, is just one of 1,800 pieces that museum officials say they are examining as they work to meet requirements while considering a broader overhaul of exhibits that are more than half a century old.

But some tribal leaders remain skeptical, saying the museums have not moved quickly enough. The new rules came after years of complaints from tribes that hundreds of thousands of objects that should have been returned under the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 are still in the hands of museums.

“If things are slow, we need to do something about it,” said Joe Baker, a Manhattan resident and member of the Delaware Indian Tribe, descendants of the Lenape people whom European traders encountered more than 400 years ago. “The collections are part of our history, our family. We need them home. We need them close.”

Sean Decatur, the New York museum’s president, promised that the tribes would be notified by authorities soon. He said staff had been reviewing exhibits in recent months to begin reaching out to tribal communities.

The museum also plans to open a small exhibit in the fall that will feature Native American voices and explain the history of the closed rooms, the reasons for the changes underway and what the future holds, he said.

Museum officials are considering a complete overhaul of the closed Eastern Woodlands and Great Plains rooms, similar to the five-year, $19 million renovation of its Northwest Coast room, completed in 2022 in close collaboration with the tribes, Decatur added.

“The ultimate goal is to make sure we tell the right stories,” he said.

Lance Gumbs, vice chairman of the Shinnecock Indian Nation, a federally recognized tribe in New York’s Hamptons, said he worries about the loss of representation of local tribes in public institutions, with the exhibit closures likely to last for years.

The American Museum of Natural History, he noted, is one of New York’s top tourist attractions and also a mainstay for generations of area students learning about the region’s tribes.

He suggests that museums use replicas made by indigenous people so that sensitive cultural objects are not physically on display.

“I don’t think tribes want their history erased from museums,” Gumbs said. “There has to be a better solution than using artifacts that were literally stolen from graves.”

Gordon Yellowman, who heads the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes’ language and culture department, said museums should look to create more digital and virtual exhibits.

He said the Oklahoma tribes would seek from the New York museum a sketchbook by Cheyenne warrior Little Finger Nail containing his battle drawings and illustrations.

The book, which is in storage and not on display, was torn from his body after he and other tribesmen were killed by U.S. soldiers in Nebraska in 1879.

“These drawings weren’t made just because they were beautiful,” Yellowman said. “They were made to show the real history of the Cheyenne and Arapaho people.”

Elsewhere, institutions are adopting other approaches.

In Chicago, the Field Museum created a repatriation center after hushing up several cases in its galleries devoted to ancient America and the peoples of the coastal Northwest and the Arctic.

The museum has also since returned four objects to the tribes, with three more pending, through efforts that were underway before the new regulations, according to spokeswoman Bridgette Russell.

At the Cleveland, Ohio, museum, a display case of artifacts from the Tlingit people of Alaska has been reopened after their leaders gave their approval, according to Todd Mesek, a museum spokesman. But two other cases remain covered, one containing funerary objects from the ancient Southwest that are to be remade with a different theme and materials.

And at Harvard, the Peabody Museum’s North American Indian Hall reopened in February after nearly 15% of its roughly 350 objects were removed from display, university spokeswoman Nicole Rura said.

Cherokee Nation Chief Chuck Hoskin says many institutions now understand they can no longer treat Native American artifacts as “museum curiosities” from “peoples who no longer exist.”

The Oklahoma tribal leader said he visited the Peabody this year after the university offered to return hair clippings collected in the early 1930s from hundreds of Native American children, including Cherokee, who were forced to assimilate into the notorious Indian boarding schools.

“The fact that we’re able to sit down with Harvard and have a really meaningful conversation is progress for the country,” he said.

Baker, for his part, wants the Ohtas returned to their tribe. He said the ceremonial doll should never have been displayed, especially if it was arranged as it was among wooden bowls, spoons and other everyday objects.

Museum officials say discussions with tribal representatives began in 2021 and will continue, even though the doll technically does not fall under federal regulation because it is associated with a tribe outside the United States, the Munsee-Delaware Nation in Ontario.

“He has a spirit. He’s a living being,” Baker said. “So if you think about him hanging on the wall for all those years in a static glass case, suffocating from lack of air, it’s just horrible, really.”

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Follow Philip Marcelo on twitter.com/philmarcelo.