#native artifacts

"[David Hostler, director of the Hoopa Museum] describes the moment when he got the first inkling of the problem with retrieving their lost patrimony. “As we started going through the collections, I was forewarned to wear gloves and a breathing apparatus. They said, ‘We don’t know what’s on this stuff, but to be safe, you should wear gloves.’ I didn’t get no clear under standing of the problem until I got back, but that’s when I first learned about the poison.” He is referring to the broad array of chemicals that collectors had been using for around 100 years to ward off bugs, rodents, and any other pests that could be imagined. Those toxic pesticides included mercury, arsenic, thymol, DDT, and naphthalene, used individually or in unique combinations. “I’ve always told people that if it’s organic, if it’s fur or fiber, and it’s over 50 years old, it’s been dosed pretty heavily,” explains Richard Hitchcock, the repatriation coordinator at Berkeley’s Hearst Museum. Herein lies a core complication with the provenance of collecting and undoing the collecting. First, Native people are subjected to genocide. Then, when their extermination seems very likely to be complete, anthropologists raise alarms about the culture being 'lost.' Bones are dug up and the other sacred items are taken to far-off museums. The survivors are separated from all the things that make life meaningful, and the academics get tenure. Communities suffer under an immeasurable loss: the loss of the people, the ancestors, the songs, the ceremonies, and the sacred items that are part of the ceremonies. If communities survive through it all and finally begin to find redress, they feel glimmers of hope. The collections are identified and the tribes retrieve their items, their people, their relatives. But after retrieval comes a new difficulty, described by journalist Matt Palmquist. Their regalia, after being stolen by whites, contaminated in museums and returned at great expense to the tribes, are too poisoned to use and too precious to pack away. If they bury the items, they risk contaminating the soil and poisoning their groundwater; if they burn them, they risk scarring their lungs by inhaling the pollutants."

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