The Denver Art Museum this month removed a case of Native American ceramics from public view in response to new federal regulations governing the exhibition of sacred Indigenous objects.
The revisions to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, known as NAGPRA, come as the Biden administration has sought to expedite the repatriation of hundreds of thousands of culturally significant Indigenous items that have remained in the possession of America’s top museums and universities.
The new rules, which took effect Jan. 12, give tribes more of a voice in how their materials are displayed. The regulations now require museums to consult with, and obtain permission from, tribes before exhibiting cultural objects.
The Denver Art Museum has complied with NAGPRA since its passage in 1990, officials said in a statement posted to the museum’s website last week, but staff, “out of an abundance of caution,” removed a case filled with Mississippian and Caddoan ceramics that had been on view.
The museum said it notified all descendant communities of these objects when staff completed original inventories following the passage of the law designed to return sacred items and funerary objects to tribes. But with more than 30 tribes claiming descent from those cultures, officials said, not all tribes chose to consult with the museum.
“While the museum doesn’t believe that displaying these items puts its galleries out of compliance with new (federal) guidelines, we are reaching out to these communities to give them another opportunity to voice any concerns before displaying these items again,” John Lukavic and Dakota Hoska, Native Arts curators, wrote in the museum’s statement.
The items include three ceramics and an incised shell gorget, all acquired by the museum in the 1980s. The four pieces were rotated into galleries in January 2023.
The revisions to NAGPRA represent a sea change in how cultural institutions deal with Indigenous artifacts in their possession. The law was supposed to lead to mass returns of funerary objects, human remains and cultural pieces that museums and universities had long used for scientific purposes or education without tribal consent.
But three decades after the landmark legislation, nearly half of these items still had not been repatriated to their rightful communities, ProPublica found in an investigation last year.
The new regulations also explicitly prohibit scientists from conducting research on Native human remains — a practice once commonplace at museums and universities, which sometimes used the research to promote racist theories such as eugenics.
Experts and tribal leaders say the latest updates to NAGPRA represent a historic moment.
“The new regulations aren’t a step forward but a leap forward in empowering tribes and Native descendants under the law,” said Chip Colwell, a former curator who spearheaded the return of dozens of pieces to tribes from the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.
Museums are acting quickly in response to the revised language.
The American Museum of Natural History in New York last week said it will close two major halls exhibiting Native American objects. The Field Museum in Chicago covered some display cases. Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, meanwhile, said it is removing Native American funerary objects from exhibitions across the museum.
“While the actions we are taking this week may seem sudden, they reflect a growing urgency among all museums to change their relationships to, and representation of, Indigenous cultures,” the American Museum of Natural History said on its website in announcing the exhibit closures. “The halls we are closing are vestiges of an era when museums such as ours did not respect the values, perspectives and indeed shared humanity of Indigenous peoples.”
Denver’s Museum of Nature & Science last summer closed its North American Indian Cultures Hall, saying it “reinforces harmful stereotypes and white, dominant culture.” In its place, the museum installed a healing statement.
In 2013, History Colorado shut down its Sand Creek Massacre exhibition due to protests from Native American community members. The museum last year redid the exhibit in close consultation with tribes.
Colorado institutions, including the Museum of Nature & Science and the University of Colorado’s Museum of Natural History, have been viewed as national leaders in returning Native American objects to tribes under NAGPRA. Centennial State collections have made available for return 95.6% of the more than 5,000 Native American remains they had possessed — double the national rate, according to a review of national data published by ProPublica.
The updated NAGPRA rules represent an opportunity for institutions to reevaluate the importance of this law, said Ernest House Jr., a member of the Ute Mountain Ute tribe and former head of the Colorado Commission of Indian Affairs.
“By engaging in true meaningful consultation, it’s gonna make that exhibit, that experience, even better for those visitors so they walk away better educated,” House said. “And it’s from a tribal perspective, not from someone speaking on behalf of a tribal nation.”
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