WEBVTT

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A confession:

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I am an archaeologist
and a museum curator,

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but a paradoxical one.

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For my museum, I collect things,

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but I also return things
back to where they came from.

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I love museums because
they're social and educational,

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but I'm most drawn to them
because of the magic of objects:

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a one-million-year-old hand axe,

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a totem pole, an impressionist painting

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all take us beyond our own imaginations.

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In museums, we pause to muse,
to gaze upon our human empire of things

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in meditation and wonder.

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I understand why US museums alone

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host more than 850 million
visits each year.

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Yet, in recent years, museums
have become a battleground.

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Communities around the world
don't want to see their culture

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in distant institutions
which they have no control over.

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They want to see their cultural treasures

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repatriated, returned
to their places of origin.

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Greece seeks the return
of the Parthenon Marbles,

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a collection of classical sculptures
held by the British Museum.

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Egypt demands antiquities from Germany.

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New Zealand's Maori want to see returned

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ancestral tattooed heads
from museums everywhere.

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Yet these claims pale in comparison
to those made by Native Americans.

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Already, US museums have returned
more than one million artifacts

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and 50,000 sets
of Native American skeletons.

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To illustrate what's at stake,
let's start with the War Gods.

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This is a wood carving

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made by members
of the Zuni tribe in New Mexico.

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In the 1880s, anthropologists
began to collect them

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as evidence of American Indian religion.

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They came to be seen as beautiful,

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the precursor to the stark sculptures
of Picasso and Paul Klee,

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helping to usher in
the modern art movement.

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From one viewpoint, the museum
did exactly as it's supposed to

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with the War God.

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It helped introduce
a little-known art form

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for the world to appreciate.

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But from another point of view,

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the museum had committed
a terrible crime of cultural violence.

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For Zunis, the War God
is not a piece of art,

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it is not even a thing.

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It is a being.

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For Zunis, every year,

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priests ritually carve new War Gods,

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the Ahayu:da,

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breathing life into them
in a long ceremony.

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They are placed on sacred shrines

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where they live to protect the Zuni people

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and keep the universe in balance.

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No one can own or sell a War God.

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They belong only to the earth.

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And so Zunis want them back from museums

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so they can go to their shrine homes

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to fulfill their spiritual purpose.

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What is a curator to do?

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I believe that the War Gods
should be returned.

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This might be a startling answer.

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After all, my conclusion
contradicts the refrain

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of the world's most famous archaeologist:

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"That belongs in a museum!"

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(Laughter)

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is what Indiana Jones said,
not just to drive movie plots,

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but to drive home the unquestionable good
of museums for society.

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I did not come to my view easily.

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I grew up in Tucson, Arizona,

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and fell in love
with the Sonoran Desert's past.

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I was amazed that beneath
the city's bland strip malls

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was 12,000 years of history
just waiting to be discovered.

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When I was 16 years old,
I started taking archaeology classes

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and going out on digs.

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A high school teacher of mine
even helped me set up my own laboratory

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to study animal bones.

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But in college,

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I came to learn that my future career
had a dark history.

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Starting in the 1860s,

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Native American skeletons
became a tool for science,

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collected in the thousands

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to prove new theories
of social and racial hierarchies.

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Native American human remains
were plundered from graves,

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even taken fresh from battlefields.

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When archaeologists
came across white graves,

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the skeleton was often quickly reburied,

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while Native bones were deposited
as specimens on museum shelves.

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In the wake of war, stolen land,
boarding schools,

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laws banning religion,

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anthropologists collected sacred objects

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in the belief that Native peoples
were on the cusp of extinction.

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You can call it racism or colonialism,
but the labels don't matter

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as much as the fact
that over the last century,

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Native American rights and culture
were taken from them.

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In 1990, after years of Native protests,

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the US government,
through the US Congress,

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finally passed a law that allowed
Native Americans to reclaim

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cultural items, sacred objects
and human remains from museums.

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Many archaeologists were panicked.

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For scientists,

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it can be hard to fully grasp
how a piece of wood can be a living god

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or how spirits surround bones.

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And they knew that modern science,
especially with DNA,

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can provide luminous insights
into the past.

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As the anthropologist
Frank Norwick declared,

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"We are doing important work
that benefits all of mankind.

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We are not returning anything to anyone."

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As a college student,
all of this was an enigma

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that was hard to decipher.

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Why did Native Americans
want their heritage back

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from the very places preserving it?

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And how could scientists
spend their entire lives

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studying dead Indians

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but seem to care so little
about living ones?

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I graduated but wasn't sure
what to do next,

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so I traveled.

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One day, in South Africa,

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I visited Nelson Mandela's
former prison cell on Robben Island.

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I had an epiphany.

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Here was a man who helped
a country bridge vast divides

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to seek, however imperfectly,
reconciliation.

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I'm no Mandela, but I ask myself:

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Could I, too, plant seeds of hope
in the ruins of the past?

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In 2007, I was hired as a curator

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at the Denver Museum
of Nature and Science.

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Our team agreed that unlike
many other institutions,

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we needed to proactively confront
the legacy of museum collecting.

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We started with
the skeletons in our closet,

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100 of them.

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After months and then years,
we met with dozens of tribes

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to figure out how to get
these remains home.

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And this is hard work.

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It involves negotiating
who will receive the remains,

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how to respectfully transfer them,

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where will they go.

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Native American leaders
become undertakers,

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planning funerals for dead relatives
they had never wanted unearthed.

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A decade later, the Denver Museum
and our Native partners

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have reburied nearly all
of the human remains in the collection.

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We have returned
hundreds of sacred objects.

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But I've come to see
that these battles are endless.

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Repatriation is now a permanent feature
of the museum world.

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Hundreds of tribes are waiting their turn.

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There are always
more museums with more stuff.

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Every catalogued War God
in an American public museum

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has now been returned -- 106, so far --

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but there are more
beyond the reach of US law,

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in private collections
and outside our borders.

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In 2014, I had the chance to travel
with a respected religious leader

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from the Zuni tribe
named Octavius Seowtewa

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to visit five museums
in Europe with War Gods.

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At the Ethnological Museum of Berlin,

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we saw a War God
with a history of dubious care.

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An overly enthusiastic curator
had added chicken feathers to it.

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Its necklace had once been stolen.

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At the Musée du quai Branly in Paris,

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an official told us that the War God there
is now state property

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with no provisions for repatriation.

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He insisted that the War God
no longer served Zunis

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but museum visitors.

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He said, "We give all
of the objects to the world."

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At the British Museum,

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we were warned that the Zuni case
would establish a dangerous precedent

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for bigger disputes,

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such as the Parthenon Marbles,
claimed by Greece.

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After visiting the five museums,

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Octavius returned home
to his people empty-handed.

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He later told me,

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"It hurts my heart to see
the Ahayu:da so far away.

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They all belong together.

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It's like a family member
that's missing from a family dinner.

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When one is gone,
their strength is broken."

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I wish that my colleagues
in Europe and beyond

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could see that the War Gods
do not represent the end of museums

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but the chance for a new beginning.

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When you walk the halls of a museum,

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you're likely just seeing
about one percent

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of the total collections.

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The rest is in storage.

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Even after returning
500 cultural items and skeletons,

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my museum still retains 99.999 percent
of its total collections.

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Though we no longer have War Gods,

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we have Zuni traditional pottery,

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jewelry, tools, clothing and arts.

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And even more precious than these objects

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are the relationships that we formed
with Native Americans

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through the process of repatriation.

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Now, we can ask Zunis
to share their culture with us.

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Not long ago, I had the chance
to visit the returned War Gods.

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A shrine sits up high atop a mesa
overlooking beautiful Zuni homeland.

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The shrine is enclosed
by a roofless stone building

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threaded at the top with barbed wire

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to ensure that they're not stolen again.

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And there they are, inside,

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the Ahayu:da,

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106 War Gods amid offerings
of turquoise, cornmeal, shell,

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even T-shirts ...

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a modern gift to ancient beings.

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And standing there,

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I got a glimpse at the War Gods'
true purpose in the world.

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And it occurred to me then

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that we do not get to choose
the histories that we inherit.

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Museum curators today
did not pillage ancient graves

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or steal spiritual objects,

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but we can accept responsibility
for correcting past mistakes.

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We can help restore dignity,

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hope and humanity to Native Americans,

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the very people who were once
the voiceless objects of our curiosity.

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And this doesn't even require us
to fully understand others' beliefs,

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only that we respect them.

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Museums are temples to things past.

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Now they must also become
places for living cultures.

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As I turned to walk away from the shrine,

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I drank in the warm summer air,

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and I watched an eagle
turn lazy circles high above.

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I thought of the Zunis,

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whose offerings ensure
that their culture is not dead and gone

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but alive and well,

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and I could think of no better place
for the War Gods to be.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)