By Katie Goss ’23
Business Manager & News Editor
Content warning: this article discusses violence against Indigeonous people.
“It feels good that we got to this place, but it is tempered with [the fact] that it should have never happened in the first place, and [that] it took this long for it [repatriation] to happen,” Aaron Miller, associate curator of visual and material culture and Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act coordinator at Mount Holyoke, said.
On Oct. 15, Mount Holyoke College repatriated the remains of an Indigenous body, returning the remains to the Hassanamisco Nipmuc Nation through the Stockbridge-Munsee community.
In 1918, individuals who lived in the Holyoke area donated a set of human remains to the College. This occurred shortly after a 1917 fire, which destroyed the College’s natural history museum and most of its biological collection. In the wake of the fire, the College received donations from community members in an effort to re-establish the collection.
“[The donation] … was a reaction to [the] 1917 … fire in the Williston building. [The building] housed the natural history museum, [which had] a lot of biological collections,” Miller explained. “During that time you see a lot of donations of lots of different types to the College.”
The history of the remains before their donation to the College is unknown, including exactly when and where they were excavated.
The remains were thereafter used as a teaching tool in classes, and although the College is not sure when they stopped being used for instructional purposes, according to Miller, they were stored away after federal law NAGPRA was passed in 1990. NAGPRA required that any public institutions, or institutions receiving federal funding, conduct an inventory of their collections that relate to Indigenous items and objects, such as human remains, sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony.
In light of the mandated inventory checks, it became clear to the College that they had Indigenous remains in their possession, according to Miller. They began working to find out which community the remains were connected with. Other colleges within the Five College Consortium also possessed artifacts or human remains that belonged to Indigenous communities and began conversations regarding moving towards repatriation, according to Miller. He said that while he didn’t know whether Mount Holyoke was part of these conversations, he assumed that the College was likely involved.
“Unfortunately, most of the colleges had collections that had human remains. There was a big initiative, primarily led by [University of Massachusetts] Amherst, to look at [the] Connecticut river valley human remains, and figure out the appropriate way to repatriate them,” Miller said.
Efforts to repatriate the remains stopped somewhere in the early 2000s for unknown reasons, according to Miller. In 2015, these efforts picked back up, led initially by College President Sonya Stephens, who was dean of faculty at the time. Many others joined the project in the following years, and eventually, Miller took over as NAGPRA coordinator to facilitate the final transfer of the remains and the paperwork. Although Miller worked on the repatriation, the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum was not responsible for the remains.
On Oct. 15, the remains were repatriated to the Stockbridge-Munsee community. While the remains belong to the Hassanamisco Nipmuc Nation, NAGPRA regulations require them to be repatriated to a federally-recognized tribe, according to Miller. Because the Hassanamisco Nipmuc Nation are only state recognized, the Stockbridge-Munsee and Hassanamisco Nipmuc communities agreed the Stockbridge-Munsee would take the remains on paper. Once the remains were repatriated, the Stockbridge-Munsee community transferred them to the Hassanamisco Nipmuc.
On Nov. 30, Mount Holyoke College hosted a talk by Larry Spotted Crow Mann, preceded by a reflection given by Stephens, honoring the repatriated Indigenous remains.“Institutions with long histories have much work to do to understand the legacies of their past,” Stephens said. “We are deeply sorry to have held the remains of this ancestor here at the College, and we invite you all in this moment to honor them.”
Although the remains have been fully repatriated, the College’s Art Museum still possesses objects that they are working toward repatriating. However, as they figure out to whom these objects belong, there is a chance some objects’ original communities may not be looking to repatriate, according to Miller. This does not mean these communities may not wish to repatriate in the future.
“The way NAGPRA works is [that] it is never finished. In the case of these ancestral remains, the repatriation part is finished. When it comes to the art museum, there are hundreds of objects and some are believed to be NAGPRA sensitive … Others, we aren’t sure,” Miller said.
The objects they believe to be NAGPRA sensitive, whether they are working towards repatriation currently on them or not, are not used in any teaching — nor are they put on display, unless they have specific permission from the community the object came from to do so.
Miller said, “It is a positive moment that this repatriation has happened, and I believe there will be conversations about this history and what took place moving forward.”