As a citizen of the Quapaw Nation, Ahnili Johnson-Jennings has always seen Dartmouth College as the university for Native American students.
Her father graduated from the school, founded in 1769 to educate Native Americans, and she had come to rely on its network of students, professors and administrators. But news that the Ivy League school in New Hampshire identified partial skeletal remains of 15 Native Americans in one of its collections has Johnson-Jennings and others reassessing that relationship.
“One hundred years ago, it was OK for a professor, for an alumni to go into the lands of a Native community and dig up their ancestors,” said Professor“It’s amazing that folks didn’t recognize how harmful that was,” he continued. Critics complain that many institutions move too slowly, invoking an exception in NAGPRA for remains they label as culturally unidentifiable. That puts the burden on tribes to prove the remains are their ancestors, an expense many can’t afford.
“When our ancestors’ remains and their cultural artifacts are restored to us, we are not only able to lay them to rest according to our traditions — we regain nothing less than the history of our people and the ability to tell our own stories,” Halbritter’s statement said. “Each repatriation represents another step forward on a long journey toward recognition of our sovereignty as a Nation and our dignity as people.
The remains held in Dartmouth’s teaching collection in Silsby Hall were identified as Native in November in an audit led by Jami Powell, curator of Indigenous art at Dartmouth’s Hood Museum.
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