Brown University looks to repatriate over 80 native remains

Lee Lomayestewa has worked at the Hopi Cultural Preservation office in Arizona for almost thirty years. His job is to coordinate the re-burials of his and his neighboring tribes’ ancestors — ancestors who were excavated from their burial grounds in the 18th and 19th centuries and sold or sent around the world, including to Rhode Island.

Hopi traditional homelands are close to the Grand Canyon, a world away from the Ocean State. Lomayestewa says his ancestors tell his tribe’s Elders they feel out of place in the dense Bristol woods, at the Haffenreffer Collections building near the edge of Mt. Hope Bay.

“They're telling them, in their minds, they're actually talking to them and they're wanting to come home so they could be here with us,” said Lomayestewa.

Late last month, Lomayestewa was notified that the Haffenreffer possesses two individuals who could be Hopi, identified by the objects they were buried with, including shell jewelry and pottery. Getting this notification is hardly a first for him. He estimates his office has received up to 10,000 notifications like this over the course of his work at the cultural preservation office.

He says some Southwestern tribes, like the Hopi, traditionally celebrate life with ceremonies rather than death, so reinterment is simple.

“We don't have a reburial ceremony, but we try to do it as best as we can of how we do it today. We just make prayer feathers for them for their safe journey back,” he said.

The Haffenreffer Museum at Brown University, along with other cultural and educational institutions and state and federal agencies around the country are holding tens of thousands of Native American remains, funerary objects, and sacred religious items that many tribes would like back.

According to its curator, The Haffenreffer possesses roughly 86 Indigenous human remains and additional associated artifacts, and it wants to repatriate all of them within the next 20 or so months. That figure includes the two individuals from the southwest, five Seminole people, and nearly 80 people whose geographic origin is not yet known. Most are American Indian, but others come from tribes around the world.

The Haffenreffer Museum came to be in possession of the remains when Rhode Island brewing royalty Rudolf F. Haffenreffer Jr.’s widow donated his collection to Brown University in 1955.

Haffenreffer was the son of a Rhode Island brewer and served as the president of the Narragansett Brewing Company for over two decades. Thierry Gentis, the longtime curator for the Haffenreffer Museum said Haffenreffer traveled around the U.S. acquiring artifacts for his collection during business trips. He was particularly interested in Native cultures. He kept detailed notes on where he purchased cultural items, or acquired human remains, but often, where they came from before, was not known.

“He would stop at the trading post and just buy all of the Navajo blankets, all of the ceramics, pueblo ceramics. And that is the level of knowledge we have for where these things came from,” Gentis said.

Gentis says the museum’s impending move has highlighted the issue of the remains. Many tribes, like the Hopi, and the Narragansett locally, say it’s problematic for other people to disturb someone else’s ancestors and claim ownership of their bones. With that in mind, Gentis says it would be wrong to move the remains from Bristol to Providence without the input of the tribes to whom they belong.

“We have these collections that are other people's ancestors. And these are not things that we really want,” he said.

Besides the issue of the move, Gentis is coming up on another deadline. It has been more than three decades since the federal government passed a law requiring institutions to repatriate Indigenous human remains to tribes. Since the law came out, Brown University has repatriated remains just three times: a Wampanoag ancestor from Rhode Island, a Wabenaki ancestor from Maine, and remains from the Native Village of Kotzebue, an Iñupiaq Tribe in Alaska, that the museum was holding for the Bureau of Land Management, a federal agency within the Department of the Interior.

Regulations on timelines for museum repatriations weren’t specific until Jan 12, 2024, when the federal government revised the law. Now, institutions must identify the origins of remains in consultation with tribes and make them available for repatriation within the next five years.

Matthew Fletcher, a tribal lawyer, law professor and enrolled member of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, faults museums like the Haffenreffer for taking more than three decades to get serious about repatriation and consultation.

“These tribes are desperate to get their ancestors back,” Fletcher said.

Previously, institutions did not need to reach out to tribes directly. They only needed to post a notification in the Federal Register, a daily bulletin put out by the U.S. government that can be thousands of pages long. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, is the name of the law that governs the process, and Fletcher says it still needs to be strengthened because institutions don’t face sufficient consequences for not complying.

“The law doesn't really create an effective enforcement mechanism for something like NAGPRA, or Tribal Consultation generally,” said Fletcher. “Tribes are government, they're sovereign entities, they're entitled to more notice than you would give somebody who absconded in order to not pay child support.”

Thierry Gentis, the Haffenreffer curator, argues the identification and repatriation process is inherently slow, especially when more than one tribe might be the rightful home for the remains.

When geographic provenances are largely unknown, or only loosely known, the museum sends notifications to multiple tribes with ties to a region, and those tribes must work together, despite any historical or personal differences, or competing claims to the remains. Even when everything goes smoothly, it can take a long time. When Gentis helped repatriate the Wampanoag person, he said it took 21 years of work. Several tribes in the area had to agree on the details of the burial and apply for permits to reintern the remains in Warren, Rhode Island.

But Gentis says the process is improving. As of fall of 2022, the museum has been working with Bernstein and Associates, a consultancy firm that specializes in helping institutions comply with the law.

The museum is now confident repatriations will occur before the Haffenreffer’s larger collection is moved during the Fall 2025 semester. The reason for the collection’s move is because Brown wants to divest itself of the Haffenreffer land. The land is sacred for several tribal groups in the area, and the University would like to find a way to transfer it to them.

Brown University is not the only Rhode Island institution with Native human remains in its possession. According to a federal database, the University of Rhode Island holds 25 individuals in its collections and the city of Providence-owned Museum of Natural History and Planetarium in Roger Williams Park holds four.

The Public’s Radio in Rhode Island and WBUR have a partnership in which the news organizations collaborate and share stories. This story was originally published by The Public's Radio.