1 00:00:01,992 --> 00:00:03,810 A confession: 2 00:00:03,834 --> 00:00:06,807 I am an archaeologist and a museum curator, 3 00:00:06,831 --> 00:00:09,020 but a paradoxical one. 4 00:00:09,637 --> 00:00:12,268 For my museum, I collect things, 5 00:00:12,292 --> 00:00:15,700 but I also return things back to where they came from. 6 00:00:16,815 --> 00:00:21,371 I love museums because they're social and educational, 7 00:00:21,395 --> 00:00:25,125 but I'm most drawn to them because of the magic of objects: 8 00:00:25,814 --> 00:00:28,292 a one-million-year-old hand axe, 9 00:00:28,316 --> 00:00:31,270 a totem pole, an impressionist painting 10 00:00:31,294 --> 00:00:34,219 all take us beyond our own imaginations. 11 00:00:35,228 --> 00:00:41,658 In museums, we pause to muse, to gaze upon our human empire of things 12 00:00:41,682 --> 00:00:43,729 in meditation and wonder. 13 00:00:45,315 --> 00:00:47,549 I understand why US museums alone 14 00:00:47,573 --> 00:00:51,938 host more than 850 million visits each year. 15 00:00:53,390 --> 00:00:57,080 Yet, in recent years, museums have become a battleground. 16 00:00:57,564 --> 00:01:00,428 Communities around the world don't want to see their culture 17 00:01:00,452 --> 00:01:04,187 in distant institutions which they have no control over. 18 00:01:04,783 --> 00:01:06,924 They want to see their cultural treasures 19 00:01:06,948 --> 00:01:10,666 repatriated, returned to their places of origin. 20 00:01:11,679 --> 00:01:14,465 Greece seeks the return of the Parthenon Marbles, 21 00:01:14,489 --> 00:01:18,671 a collection of classical sculptures held by the British Museum. 22 00:01:19,425 --> 00:01:22,210 Egypt demands antiquities from Germany. 23 00:01:23,187 --> 00:01:25,983 New Zealand's Maori want to see returned 24 00:01:26,007 --> 00:01:30,356 ancestral tattooed heads from museums everywhere. 25 00:01:31,197 --> 00:01:36,085 Yet these claims pale in comparison to those made by Native Americans. 26 00:01:36,857 --> 00:01:40,770 Already, US museums have returned more than one million artifacts 27 00:01:40,794 --> 00:01:44,768 and 50,000 sets of Native American skeletons. 28 00:01:46,891 --> 00:01:50,588 To illustrate what's at stake, let's start with the War Gods. 29 00:01:51,461 --> 00:01:53,311 This is a wood carving 30 00:01:53,335 --> 00:01:56,726 made by members of the Zuni tribe in New Mexico. 31 00:01:57,399 --> 00:02:00,598 In the 1880s, anthropologists began to collect them 32 00:02:00,622 --> 00:02:03,009 as evidence of American Indian religion. 33 00:02:04,040 --> 00:02:07,099 They came to be seen as beautiful, 34 00:02:07,123 --> 00:02:12,096 the precursor to the stark sculptures of Picasso and Paul Klee, 35 00:02:12,120 --> 00:02:15,643 helping to usher in the modern art movement. 36 00:02:16,559 --> 00:02:20,806 From one viewpoint, the museum did exactly as it's supposed to 37 00:02:20,830 --> 00:02:22,250 with the War God. 38 00:02:22,274 --> 00:02:24,693 It helped introduce a little-known art form 39 00:02:24,717 --> 00:02:26,583 for the world to appreciate. 40 00:02:28,200 --> 00:02:29,717 But from another point of view, 41 00:02:29,741 --> 00:02:34,184 the museum had committed a terrible crime of cultural violence. 42 00:02:35,589 --> 00:02:39,620 For Zunis, the War God is not a piece of art, 43 00:02:39,644 --> 00:02:41,613 it is not even a thing. 44 00:02:41,637 --> 00:02:43,136 It is a being. 45 00:02:45,521 --> 00:02:48,197 For Zunis, every year, 46 00:02:48,221 --> 00:02:50,443 priests ritually carve new War Gods, 47 00:02:50,467 --> 00:02:51,959 the Ahayu:da, 48 00:02:51,983 --> 00:02:54,586 breathing life into them in a long ceremony. 49 00:02:55,408 --> 00:02:57,380 They are placed on sacred shrines 50 00:02:57,404 --> 00:03:00,645 where they live to protect the Zuni people 51 00:03:00,669 --> 00:03:02,983 and keep the universe in balance. 52 00:03:03,856 --> 00:03:06,158 No one can own or sell a War God. 53 00:03:06,182 --> 00:03:08,379 They belong only to the earth. 54 00:03:09,443 --> 00:03:12,610 And so Zunis want them back from museums 55 00:03:12,634 --> 00:03:14,744 so they can go to their shrine homes 56 00:03:16,531 --> 00:03:18,792 to fulfill their spiritual purpose. 57 00:03:20,451 --> 00:03:22,784 What is a curator to do? 58 00:03:23,461 --> 00:03:27,056 I believe that the War Gods should be returned. 59 00:03:28,694 --> 00:03:30,321 This might be a startling answer. 60 00:03:30,345 --> 00:03:32,924 After all, my conclusion contradicts the refrain 61 00:03:32,948 --> 00:03:35,495 of the world's most famous archaeologist: 62 00:03:36,174 --> 00:03:37,728 "That belongs in a museum!" 63 00:03:37,752 --> 00:03:40,688 (Laughter) 64 00:03:40,712 --> 00:03:44,736 is what Indiana Jones said, not just to drive movie plots, 65 00:03:44,760 --> 00:03:49,518 but to drive home the unquestionable good of museums for society. 66 00:03:51,052 --> 00:03:53,544 I did not come to my view easily. 67 00:03:53,926 --> 00:03:56,377 I grew up in Tucson, Arizona, 68 00:03:56,401 --> 00:03:59,210 and fell in love with the Sonoran Desert's past. 69 00:04:00,037 --> 00:04:04,018 I was amazed that beneath the city's bland strip malls 70 00:04:04,042 --> 00:04:07,915 was 12,000 years of history just waiting to be discovered. 71 00:04:08,983 --> 00:04:12,250 When I was 16 years old, I started taking archaeology classes 72 00:04:12,274 --> 00:04:14,059 and going out on digs. 73 00:04:14,896 --> 00:04:18,168 A high school teacher of mine even helped me set up my own laboratory 74 00:04:18,192 --> 00:04:19,769 to study animal bones. 75 00:04:21,061 --> 00:04:22,211 But in college, 76 00:04:23,125 --> 00:04:27,480 I came to learn that my future career had a dark history. 77 00:04:28,372 --> 00:04:31,103 Starting in the 1860s, 78 00:04:31,127 --> 00:04:35,254 Native American skeletons became a tool for science, 79 00:04:35,278 --> 00:04:37,136 collected in the thousands 80 00:04:37,160 --> 00:04:41,444 to prove new theories of social and racial hierarchies. 81 00:04:42,735 --> 00:04:47,243 Native American human remains were plundered from graves, 82 00:04:47,267 --> 00:04:49,933 even taken fresh from battlefields. 83 00:04:52,370 --> 00:04:54,823 When archaeologists came across white graves, 84 00:04:54,847 --> 00:04:57,283 the skeleton was often quickly reburied, 85 00:04:57,307 --> 00:05:02,326 while Native bones were deposited as specimens on museum shelves. 86 00:05:03,380 --> 00:05:06,705 In the wake of war, stolen land, boarding schools, 87 00:05:06,729 --> 00:05:08,516 laws banning religion, 88 00:05:08,540 --> 00:05:10,642 anthropologists collected sacred objects 89 00:05:10,666 --> 00:05:14,657 in the belief that Native peoples were on the cusp of extinction. 90 00:05:16,162 --> 00:05:20,545 You can call it racism or colonialism, but the labels don't matter 91 00:05:20,569 --> 00:05:23,377 as much as the fact that over the last century, 92 00:05:23,401 --> 00:05:27,011 Native American rights and culture were taken from them. 93 00:05:28,039 --> 00:05:31,250 In 1990, after years of Native protests, 94 00:05:31,274 --> 00:05:33,707 the US government, through the US Congress, 95 00:05:33,731 --> 00:05:38,081 finally passed a law that allowed Native Americans to reclaim 96 00:05:38,105 --> 00:05:41,699 cultural items, sacred objects and human remains from museums. 97 00:05:42,854 --> 00:05:45,458 Many archaeologists were panicked. 98 00:05:46,713 --> 00:05:47,887 For scientists, 99 00:05:47,911 --> 00:05:54,151 it can be hard to fully grasp how a piece of wood can be a living god 100 00:05:54,175 --> 00:05:56,403 or how spirits surround bones. 101 00:05:56,427 --> 00:06:00,229 And they knew that modern science, especially with DNA, 102 00:06:00,253 --> 00:06:03,792 can provide luminous insights into the past. 103 00:06:05,155 --> 00:06:07,714 As the anthropologist Frank Norwick declared, 104 00:06:07,738 --> 00:06:11,869 "We are doing important work that benefits all of mankind. 105 00:06:11,893 --> 00:06:14,920 We are not returning anything to anyone." 106 00:06:17,381 --> 00:06:20,358 As a college student, all of this was an enigma 107 00:06:20,382 --> 00:06:22,777 that was hard to decipher. 108 00:06:23,409 --> 00:06:26,402 Why did Native Americans want their heritage back 109 00:06:26,426 --> 00:06:28,806 from the very places preserving it? 110 00:06:29,849 --> 00:06:33,071 And how could scientists spend their entire lives 111 00:06:33,095 --> 00:06:34,586 studying dead Indians 112 00:06:34,610 --> 00:06:37,687 but seem to care so little about living ones? 113 00:06:40,221 --> 00:06:43,412 I graduated but wasn't sure what to do next, 114 00:06:43,436 --> 00:06:45,094 so I traveled. 115 00:06:46,897 --> 00:06:48,596 One day, in South Africa, 116 00:06:48,620 --> 00:06:52,079 I visited Nelson Mandela's former prison cell on Robben Island. 117 00:06:53,160 --> 00:06:54,477 I had an epiphany. 118 00:06:55,590 --> 00:06:59,774 Here was a man who helped a country bridge vast divides 119 00:06:59,798 --> 00:07:02,695 to seek, however imperfectly, reconciliation. 120 00:07:04,120 --> 00:07:06,829 I'm no Mandela, but I ask myself: 121 00:07:06,853 --> 00:07:10,813 Could I, too, plant seeds of hope in the ruins of the past? 122 00:07:11,586 --> 00:07:13,955 In 2007, I was hired as a curator 123 00:07:13,979 --> 00:07:16,777 at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. 124 00:07:16,801 --> 00:07:20,013 Our team agreed that unlike many other institutions, 125 00:07:20,037 --> 00:07:24,587 we needed to proactively confront the legacy of museum collecting. 126 00:07:25,850 --> 00:07:29,065 We started with the skeletons in our closet, 127 00:07:29,089 --> 00:07:30,476 100 of them. 128 00:07:31,035 --> 00:07:33,782 After months and then years, we met with dozens of tribes 129 00:07:33,806 --> 00:07:36,082 to figure out how to get these remains home. 130 00:07:36,840 --> 00:07:38,198 And this is hard work. 131 00:07:38,222 --> 00:07:42,301 It involves negotiating who will receive the remains, 132 00:07:42,325 --> 00:07:44,253 how to respectfully transfer them, 133 00:07:44,277 --> 00:07:46,007 where will they go. 134 00:07:46,734 --> 00:07:50,341 Native American leaders become undertakers, 135 00:07:50,365 --> 00:07:54,944 planning funerals for dead relatives they had never wanted unearthed. 136 00:07:57,106 --> 00:07:59,816 A decade later, the Denver Museum and our Native partners 137 00:07:59,840 --> 00:08:03,606 have reburied nearly all of the human remains in the collection. 138 00:08:04,098 --> 00:08:06,677 We have returned hundreds of sacred objects. 139 00:08:07,600 --> 00:08:10,764 But I've come to see that these battles are endless. 140 00:08:11,837 --> 00:08:15,598 Repatriation is now a permanent feature of the museum world. 141 00:08:17,310 --> 00:08:19,548 Hundreds of tribes are waiting their turn. 142 00:08:20,668 --> 00:08:23,841 There are always more museums with more stuff. 143 00:08:24,766 --> 00:08:27,679 Every catalogued War God in an American public museum 144 00:08:27,703 --> 00:08:31,933 has now been returned -- 106, so far -- 145 00:08:31,957 --> 00:08:34,997 but there are more beyond the reach of US law, 146 00:08:35,021 --> 00:08:37,988 in private collections and outside our borders. 147 00:08:39,225 --> 00:08:44,329 In 2014, I had the chance to travel with a respected religious leader 148 00:08:44,353 --> 00:08:48,195 from the Zuni tribe named Octavius Seowtewa 149 00:08:48,219 --> 00:08:50,908 to visit five museums in Europe with War Gods. 150 00:08:51,680 --> 00:08:54,339 At the Ethnological Museum of Berlin, 151 00:08:54,363 --> 00:08:58,092 we saw a War God with a history of dubious care. 152 00:08:58,443 --> 00:09:02,062 An overly enthusiastic curator had added chicken feathers to it. 153 00:09:02,922 --> 00:09:05,022 Its necklace had once been stolen. 154 00:09:06,267 --> 00:09:08,316 At the Musée du quai Branly in Paris, 155 00:09:08,340 --> 00:09:11,673 an official told us that the War God there is now state property 156 00:09:11,697 --> 00:09:14,530 with no provisions for repatriation. 157 00:09:14,554 --> 00:09:17,466 He insisted that the War God no longer served Zunis 158 00:09:17,490 --> 00:09:18,807 but museum visitors. 159 00:09:19,238 --> 00:09:22,418 He said, "We give all of the objects to the world." 160 00:09:23,487 --> 00:09:24,939 At the British Museum, 161 00:09:24,963 --> 00:09:28,971 we were warned that the Zuni case would establish a dangerous precedent 162 00:09:28,995 --> 00:09:30,440 for bigger disputes, 163 00:09:30,464 --> 00:09:34,018 such as the Parthenon Marbles, claimed by Greece. 164 00:09:34,574 --> 00:09:37,043 After visiting the five museums, 165 00:09:37,067 --> 00:09:40,867 Octavius returned home to his people empty-handed. 166 00:09:42,284 --> 00:09:43,594 He later told me, 167 00:09:43,618 --> 00:09:46,919 "It hurts my heart to see the Ahayu:da so far away. 168 00:09:46,943 --> 00:09:48,617 They all belong together. 169 00:09:49,066 --> 00:09:53,344 It's like a family member that's missing from a family dinner. 170 00:09:54,292 --> 00:09:57,716 When one is gone, their strength is broken." 171 00:09:58,848 --> 00:10:01,662 I wish that my colleagues in Europe and beyond 172 00:10:01,686 --> 00:10:05,163 could see that the War Gods do not represent the end of museums 173 00:10:05,187 --> 00:10:07,384 but the chance for a new beginning. 174 00:10:08,861 --> 00:10:11,457 When you walk the halls of a museum, 175 00:10:11,481 --> 00:10:14,250 you're likely just seeing about one percent 176 00:10:14,274 --> 00:10:15,493 of the total collections. 177 00:10:15,517 --> 00:10:17,511 The rest is in storage. 178 00:10:17,535 --> 00:10:21,322 Even after returning 500 cultural items and skeletons, 179 00:10:21,346 --> 00:10:27,218 my museum still retains 99.999 percent of its total collections. 180 00:10:27,987 --> 00:10:29,647 Though we no longer have War Gods, 181 00:10:29,671 --> 00:10:32,051 we have Zuni traditional pottery, 182 00:10:32,075 --> 00:10:35,487 jewelry, tools, clothing and arts. 183 00:10:36,461 --> 00:10:39,288 And even more precious than these objects 184 00:10:39,312 --> 00:10:42,645 are the relationships that we formed with Native Americans 185 00:10:42,669 --> 00:10:45,295 through the process of repatriation. 186 00:10:46,673 --> 00:10:51,347 Now, we can ask Zunis to share their culture with us. 187 00:10:52,810 --> 00:10:56,469 Not long ago, I had the chance to visit the returned War Gods. 188 00:10:57,263 --> 00:11:02,791 A shrine sits up high atop a mesa overlooking beautiful Zuni homeland. 189 00:11:04,466 --> 00:11:08,681 The shrine is enclosed by a roofless stone building 190 00:11:08,705 --> 00:11:11,133 threaded at the top with barbed wire 191 00:11:11,157 --> 00:11:13,093 to ensure that they're not stolen again. 192 00:11:14,553 --> 00:11:16,894 And there they are, inside, 193 00:11:16,918 --> 00:11:18,122 the Ahayu:da, 194 00:11:18,146 --> 00:11:23,557 106 War Gods amid offerings of turquoise, cornmeal, shell, 195 00:11:23,581 --> 00:11:24,787 even T-shirts ... 196 00:11:26,149 --> 00:11:28,097 a modern gift to ancient beings. 197 00:11:29,306 --> 00:11:31,021 And standing there, 198 00:11:31,045 --> 00:11:34,488 I got a glimpse at the War Gods' true purpose in the world. 199 00:11:35,518 --> 00:11:37,161 And it occurred to me then 200 00:11:37,185 --> 00:11:41,240 that we do not get to choose the histories that we inherit. 201 00:11:42,043 --> 00:11:45,178 Museum curators today did not pillage ancient graves 202 00:11:45,202 --> 00:11:46,988 or steal spiritual objects, 203 00:11:47,012 --> 00:11:51,274 but we can accept responsibility for correcting past mistakes. 204 00:11:52,232 --> 00:11:54,472 We can help restore dignity, 205 00:11:54,496 --> 00:11:57,933 hope and humanity to Native Americans, 206 00:11:57,957 --> 00:12:01,774 the very people who were once the voiceless objects of our curiosity. 207 00:12:02,400 --> 00:12:07,481 And this doesn't even require us to fully understand others' beliefs, 208 00:12:07,505 --> 00:12:09,598 only that we respect them. 209 00:12:10,732 --> 00:12:13,457 Museums are temples to things past. 210 00:12:14,406 --> 00:12:18,278 Now they must also become places for living cultures. 211 00:12:20,466 --> 00:12:22,736 As I turned to walk away from the shrine, 212 00:12:22,760 --> 00:12:25,134 I drank in the warm summer air, 213 00:12:25,158 --> 00:12:28,239 and I watched an eagle turn lazy circles high above. 214 00:12:29,483 --> 00:12:30,936 I thought of the Zunis, 215 00:12:30,960 --> 00:12:35,155 whose offerings ensure that their culture is not dead and gone 216 00:12:35,179 --> 00:12:36,821 but alive and well, 217 00:12:37,970 --> 00:12:41,390 and I could think of no better place for the War Gods to be. 218 00:12:42,069 --> 00:12:43,220 Thank you. 219 00:12:43,244 --> 00:12:48,500 (Applause)