On Friday, the American Museum of Natural History in New York City emptied two of its exhibition halls and covered up multiple displays, following new federal regulations that require institutions to first obtain consent from native tribes before displaying their cultural artifacts.
The museum, which draws nearly 5 million visitors each year, said in a notice to staff members that it will close displays dedicated to the Eastern Woodlands and the Great Plains tribes for the upcoming weekend.
“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,” Sean Decatur, the museum’s president, wrote in the notice. “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.”
“Actions that may feel sudden to some may seem long overdue to others,” he added.
The move means that exhibition spaces covering almost 10,000 square feet will close their doors to visitors while the museum goes through its inventory and consults lawyers to make sure it complies with the new federal rules that went into effect on Jan. 12.
As a result, some artifacts may leave display pedestals permanently, Mr. Decatur said in an interview with the New York Times.
“Some objects may never come back on display as a result of the consultation process. But we are looking to create smaller-scale programs throughout the museum that can explain what kind of process is underway,” he told the Times.
Some of the items removed from display were used to teach students on field trips about Native American culture, the Times said.
The law has not been free from criticism over the past decades, including from some native tribal leaders, who complained that the process of getting the remains and objects in question back was too slow and relied too much on institutional goodwill.
Last month, President Joe Biden signed an executive order affirming the fundamental right of “tribal self-governance.” The order, among other things, called for the Interior Department to roll out the final rules on implementing NAGPRA.
The final rules addressed some of the tribes’ complaints, including a mandate that museums need “free, prior and informed consent before any exhibition of, access to, or research on human remains or cultural items.” The rules also seek to accelerate the return process by setting a five-year deadline for institutions to prepare all human remains and related objects for repatriation.
More importantly, the new NAGPRA rules eliminated the category of “culturally unidentifiable human remains.” Under the old rules, the remains were considered “culturally unidentifiable” if they had no plausible affiliation with any federally recognized tribe or any existing native group. In the 1990s, some research institutions were able to deflect repatriation calls by simply categorizing everything in their collections that might be subject to NAGPRA as “culturally unidentifiable.”
The new regulations have met with some concerns from the Society for American Archaeology, which argued that the deadline not only significantly underestimated the time and resources involved in every step of the NAGPRA process but also added a lot of burden to the indigenous tribes.
“Museums need more than 10 days to respond to any inquiry since many, especially the larger museums, potentially may have to respond to multiple inquiries at the same time,” the National Archaeologist Organization said.
“Tribes will be inundated with requests to consult,” it added. “Similarly, they may have to submit multiple inquiries at the same time.”
