Can’t help but photographing the Halloween decorations on my walks. This year the skeletons are in abundance, with but a sprinkling of spiders, witches, and other ghouls.

Someone must have robbed the Smithsonian where tens of thousands of bones are stored. Scratch that – bad joke. The controversy over these human remains is anything but funny. Here is what I learned from a CodeSwitch program:

It turns out that the Smithsonian’ National Museum of Natural History has a huge ware house behind barbed wire in a suburb in Maryland where the bones from archeological digs are stored. More than 10 000 of them belong to Native American people, some of them full skeletons, all in drawers in a climate controlled, windowless building.

Some 1500 of them have been dug up in Florida, and a native tribe, the Seminoles, has been fighting for over a decade to get them back. Museums, who received them across the last hundreds of years in common archeological practice, want to hold on to them.

In 1989 Congress passed a law that called for repatriation of Native American remains (many of which had been literally excavated from dedicated cemeteries by grave robbers and archeologists alike) and included the Smithsonian in a direct appeal. The museum released about a third of their holdings, but is refusing to part with the rest. The reason? They will only allow repatriation if they have connected the remains with a specific federally recognized tribe, and they do so by establishing a “cultural affiliation,” which implies a process that could for all intents and purposes drag on forever. They said they needed evidence like treaties, cultural artifacts, ways of life, geographical location; that evidence is rarely easily available, however, since these remains were dug up in over 80 different locations, by numerous parties, some recording details, others not. It is an institutionalized process filled with loop holes that allows the museums to hold on to the remains without (illegally)claiming they are theirs. It was purposely built to depend on the subjective judgement of the museum administrators, not exactly a neutral party. (Evidence for this can be found in the fact that three different museums came up with three different judgments for tribal connection for bones taken all from the same site. There is simply no objective standard.)

And so the bones rest in a kind of purgatory in those drawers.

The museum’s rationale for holding on to the remains is the possibility that future questions might be answered by investigating them, questions that depend on future technology, for example. That stands in contrast to the Native American insistence for return now, since their beliefs are connected to the need for their ancestors to rest in peace.

Nobody doubts, by the way, that the contemporary Seminoles and the ancient remains are biologically related. But the museum insists on cultural affiliation, and that is in itself so hard to establish without decisive evidence – an excuse to deny repatriation. The question remains why the museum is the arbiter of what belongs to whom, instead of the Seminoles who have oral traditions and belief systems that connect them to the remains.

Ten years into the controversy the tribe started a public campaign #nomorestolenancestors, with public lectures, appeals to congress, resolutions by national tribal representatives and organization urging the museum to give back the remains. The Seminole History Museum publicly ended its relationship with the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian eventually agreed last year to develop a new policy that allows members of the Seminole tribe to look at the remains and identify who they think are ancestors to be returned. They then have to report the result to the museum which in turn will ask all the other Florida tribes to make their claims. If there are no competing demands, the ancestors will be returned. It could take decades.

Here is an interesting book by anthropologist Chip Cowell – Plundered Skulls And Stolen Spirits; Inside The Fight To Reclaim Native America’s Culture – that fills in the details of the debate.

Music today appropriate for Halloween….