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Peabody Essex Museum Gets Set of Native American Artifacts

September 21, 2017 | In the Press

From The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/21/arts/design/peabody-essex-museum-gets-set-of-native-american-artifacts.html)

A noted collection of more than 150 Native American artifacts, including wampum belts and finely beaded ceremonial garb, will stay – for now — where it has been housed for almost 70 years, at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., officials announced Thursday.

The collection is owned by the Andover Newton Theological School, the country’s oldest seminary, but has long been housed at the museum.

The Native American items in question, mostly gathered in the 19th century by Christian missionaries, are part of a larger art collection numbering over 1,100 items that the seminary is now giving to the museum. The other items include 19th century photographs and embroidery from China

The school has been cited by federal regulators for failing to adequately follow a law designed to ensure the return of sacred and other special artifacts to Native American tribes.

Dan Monroe, director of the museum, said he plans to return many of the items to tribes. “We’ll pick up that process and move it along expeditiously,” said Monroe, a noted expert on the repatriation law.

The school, facing dwindling enrollment and financial problems, moved from Massachusetts to Connecticut last spring to join with Yale Divinity School, but the controversial collection stayed behind after Yale declined to house it.

Gregory E. Sterling, the dean of the Yale Divinity School, called the matter “sensitive” and noted that, though Yale has a museum that could have accommodated the collection, “you don’t want to be wound up in an imbroglio that might make donors not want to give to your collection.”

The Native American artifacts became the subject of an intense war of words between the seminary and the museum, with Peabody officials at one point earlier this year accusing the 210-year-old school of having attempted to “monetize” the collection by attempting to sell it. Seminary officials said they were doing their best to work within the complex law and return the items to tribes.

Under the federal law known as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, sacred items, objects of cultural significance, funerary items and human remains must be repatriated to tribes.

Rosita Worl, a Tlingit tribe member and president of the Sealaska Heritage Institute in Alaska who had complained about the seminary’s lack of progress in returning a halibut fishhook the tribe deems sacred, said in an email that the repatriation process is now moving along.

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