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The Cincinnati Museum Center is recognizing Indigenous culture—and its historical truth

August 24, 2023 | In the Press

From The News Record (https://www.newsrecord.org/news/the-cincinnati-museum-center-is-recognizing-indigenous-culture-and-its-historical-truth/article_23c3b1e2-4284-11ee-a586-c36d2ae033cc.html (opens in a new window))

Native Americans have occupied North American lands for over 20,000 years, but much of what the public has been taught about their history is found to be skewed or even completely wrong. With a long lineage of history across the United States, the Cincinnati Museum Center (CMC) has recognized the deep historical inaccuracy of what has been told about Native American cultures throughout time—and one team of museum archaeologists is on a mission to correct the historical record. 

The CMC Department of Archaeology is currently working on displaying new, more historically accurate and inclusive exhibits that will feature specific Indigenous peoples' galleries told directly from their perspectives. Guests can follow along with Native American artifacts interpreted through the lens of their original tribe. Along with the new museum gallery, CMC is working to make history right through their work with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) by helping to return important ancestral properties to their original people.

“We are currently working with our tribal partners to redo all of our archaeology exhibits,” says George Rieveschl Curator of Archaeology at CMC Bob Genheimer. “[Our tribal partners] will be able to use our archaeological collections at the museum to tell their own story, which has never been done before.”  

For museums across the country, the primary goals of early American archaeology were more object-driven than people-driven—and due to the deliberate removal of the early federal government, Native American cultures have lost sacred objects and remnants of their ancestors. This is likely due to years of archaeological digging and excavations. Excavation practices have specifically targeted Native American burial places because of the objects held in those burials. These have included human remains, funerary objects and sacred cultural items. In 1990, the passage of NAGPRA ushered in a new era of correcting these past injustices.

“It is important for people to understand that the Cincinnati Museum Center took a perspective that has evolved through time, and it is quite different from the majority of the other nearby institutions—at least at the time that NAGPRA became federal legislation,” says NAGPRA Coordinator and Tribal Liaison for CMC Tyler Swinney. “The Cincinnati Museum Center doesn't view human remains as collection items, and we are currently in the process of repatriating all Native American ancestral remains in the museum's control, many of which have been in the museum's collections since the late 1800s.” 

NAGPRA requires federal agencies, museums, universities, state agencies, local governments or any institution that receives federal funds to comply and protect all human remains and cultural items located on federal and tribal lands. This has pushed forward a crucial change to museum collection practices regarding the protection of Indigenous cultural objects and remains. These objects are important to the traditional religion, culture, language and history of Native Americans. Indigenous peoples are strongly interested in protecting and controlling their cultural property. They would like the chance to reclaim their own history—a history of importance to many.

“After consulting with an Oklahoma tribe with roots in the Ohio Valley and taking them on a tour of local precontact village sites, I asked one of the tribe members where he considered home,” explains Genheimer. “The tribe had originally moved out of Ohio, gone to Kansas and then Missouri before finally settling in Oklahoma, and, without hesitation, the tribe member replied, ‘this is home.’ I was struck by the clarity and quickness of his response. Despite all of the trauma inflicted upon their tribe and their subsequent movements across the Midwest, he still considered this, the Cincinnati area, to be his home.” 

There are currently around 587 tribes federally recognized as tribal nations across the country, and CMC currently works with up to 17 local tribes at a time. “It's easy for us to rationalize things like using the cultural geographic boundaries established through colonial processes like early settlement,” says Swinney. “But, when we reference tribal nations in their aboriginal ancestral homelands, these state and country boundaries obviously didn't exist. So, the tribal nations we work with closely are the ones that inhabited, and still inhabit, this region.” 

Repatriation is the process whereby human remains and certain types of cultural items are returned to lineal descendants, Indigenous tribes, and Native Hawaiian organizations. This has already begun taking place in the museum center. It is a process that takes a lot of time and can be very slow according to Swinney. “There are a lot of positives about working with tribal nations,” Swinney says. “For one, it helps to understand better the cultural framework from which collection items originated. When you engage with tribes and discuss aspects of their culture, you inherently become better at interpreting cultural items at work sites.”   

Not only did CMC have to undertake summaries of every artifact that the museum has collected over time, but they also had to evaluate any donated or newly acquired items. The goal is to identify what the artifacts are and who they belong to, which can be a tedious process. 

“Not every tribe is affiliated to every site, even if they have had a historical presence in that area. And many different time periods are going to have many different cultural affiliations,” says Swinney. “The same tribes that were living here 5,000 years ago may not be the same ones that lived here 500 years ago, so that makes the determination of identifying a specific tribe an item belonged to very difficult.” 

Items of cultural significance that CMC is committed to repatriating will be common funerary objects such as ceramic vessels; personal ornaments and items such as tools; and organic items such as fabrics. According to Swinney, sacred and cultural heritage items are more difficult to identify. Some of these sacred objects were ornate large pipes, bronze vessels, carved stelae or objects buried in specific settings used as part of a ritual or ceremony. 

Through the facilitation and reconnection to cultural pasts and ancestral territories, NAGPRA has allowed the museum to change previous archaeological exhibits in Union Terminal to include voices previously left unheard. The new Indigenous galleries aim to provide opportunities of encouragement, supportive language revitalization programs and cultural awareness to help correct much of the misinformation that has been rampant throughout Ohio and the United States. 

“We have realized that these ancestral remains should have never been ours,” Genheimer says. “We should have never dug these items out of the ground. And now, it is time to get them back, and that's the most important aspect of our job. That has been the most rewarding part of what I have done in the last 33 years as the curator of archaeology at the museum center: getting sacred items back to where they belong.”

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