Repatriation

by Genevieve Schroeder-Acre

A Painful Introduction 

A lonely violin hums to life as drums fade in like ticking time bombs bursting, echoing through the dark wilderness. A young woman staring off into the distance longingly caresses the back of a cracked white tree whose limb has been lost to the chaos of time. Her song transports me to the “warehouse,” where I am struck with graphic images of the hanging “bruised bodies” of stolen canoes.[1] “‘Oh you are so proud of your collection of Indians,’”[2] an elder pronounces in front of the wrinkles of some faceless abuser… security guard… caretaker…

Suddenly, I am visiting my ancestors. The woman who handles them leads me and ten or so relatives, elders included, into a small portable classroom, stuffy with mid-July Texas heat. The white labeled boxes rest on a table in the center of the room surrounded by a square barrier made of four strips of yellow tape. Water and snacks lie out at a table in the back as if this were some celebratory conference. The woman reassures us that she and the other caretakers treat the remains with the “utmost respect,” but, “Please do not get too close to or touch the boxes.” Of course, she keeps a watchful eye on us in case God forbid we try to “take the young one and run.”[3] We cry tears, songs, and prayers. We promise to keep fighting at the behest of the woman whose jaw clenches and shoulders rise every time we inch a little bit closer: we can’t help it. Here we are, less than three feet away from these hostages, and still, I know, decades away from liberation. If they hear our cries, are they filled with hope or sorrow? Or anything at all? Will they, by the time they are free, be sucked dry? I keep a safe distance because I am afraid of what I might become. The young woman in the story is more resilient than I am. She offers “soft words” and wipes her tears on the bare bodies[4] as they try to ration what little nourishment she supplies. Should I be satisfied with her radical acts of resistance? Because all I can think is, it’s a drop in the bucket. I used to know this was my battle, but now I’m not so sure. Tears lick my laptop keyboard with more frequency now. I wish I had a fraction of her bravery, her optimism. I wish I knew “How to Steal a Canoe.”[5]

I cried a lot in the making of this essay. An impossible task lay ahead of me: a 6-8 page (double-spaced) document of mostly English words typed over a series of a month or so that renders a complete picture of all that “repatriation” means for “my” people and “Indigenous” people collectively, which necessarily explores “racism,” “colonialism,” “trauma,” “bodies,” “recognition” and all other words contained within them, and then ties it all up in a happy little bow. On top of all of that, watching Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s 2016 video poem awakened this old memory that forced me to reckon with the precise care with which repatriation (and therefore discourse around it) must occur. What has been helpful to me is to think of this essay as a sort of diary entry of my thoughts and feelings in response to thinking about repatriation with knowledge bearers: relatives, writers, and artists. It is an unfinished, flawed, and frustrated record that I still think has brought me closer to a personal reconciliation and maybe will help you all grapple with impossible realities, tasks, and questions in this class and in your life. Here goes nothing.

A Broken Definition

I will start, as many keyword essays do, by obscuring the Oxford English Dictionary definition of repatriation, “The return or restoration of a person to his or her native country.”[6] Of course, as with almost all English words, the keyword repatriation has its roots in colonization, as evidenced by the Latin and Italian stems, the heteronormativity and ownership implicated by “his or her” and the word “country.”[7] I could trek through the weeds of its etymology—“patriation” is linked to “patriotism” and the Latin word “pater” (father) poisoning the whole word with misogyny. For the sake of space, I will focus on the fact that “repatriation” does not begin to illustrate the diversity of understandings about why burial matters for original peoples or the unique depth of the psychological and spiritual harm the desecration of our ancestors’ graves has inflicted on communities around the world. My tribe, for example, believes in the two processes: essentially, after we die, our bodies are reintegrated with Mother Earth, allowing our spirit to journey through the cosmos. Digging up the body stops our spirit from traversing, leaving us stuck in a sort of limbo, unable to rest. “Re” patriation, therefore, has become a settler-imposed spiritual necessity. But every tribe has a different story, sometimes multiple stories, describing life after death that it would be impossible to narrow them all into one, cohesive narrative. Despite these divergences, the horror of knowing that hundreds of thousands of our relatives have been and are being kidnapped, imprisoned, and assaulted, is shared. I mean, how would you feel if someone decided to dig up your grandmother and study her without your permission?

Aware of the word’s inherent limitations, some Indigenous communities have adopted “repatriation” to present a united front, to consolidate our demands, to make them legible to policymakers who are not yet able to grasp their incompleteness. This word’s repurposing dates well before the 1990 Native American Graves Protection Act (NAGPRA)[8] was passed, and is one of many useful strategies for bringing our ancestors home. Examining repatriation stories in the context of policy continues to reaffirm the resourcefulness of Indigenous peoples, using the colonizer’s tools to build our own frameworks of sovereignty, while also illuminating the impossibility of coming close to reconciliation or justice through a “federal” or “nationalist” policy alone.

A Fragile Policy

Despite the symbolic significance of NAGPRA, its usefulness is largely contingent on the extent of the existing institutional administrations’ sympathy with Native American issues. So, as you may have guessed, it still has not addressed the grievances of most communities. First of all, the law doesn’t even apply to the non-federally recognized tribes whose widely underreported numbers make up the majority of tribes in America. Down South in our homelands now called Texas, my tribe, the Miakan-Garza Band, has organized and participated in several ongoing repatriation initiatives. For the past eight years, we have focused our energy on three remains held in cardboard boxes at The University of Texas at Austin’s (UT Austin) Archeological Research Lab.[9] In a letter in 2020, four years after our initial request, and 30 years after the passage of NAGPRA, the UT Austin President’s Chief of Staff refused to give them back on the basis that we are not a federally recognized tribe.[10] He also cited two federally recognized tribes who had contested our tribe’s request, despite the fact that these tribes have virtually no connection to our homelands, and indicated no intention to request to rebury the ancestors. I speculate the tribes fear that the University honoring our rights would undermine their recognition status, but that’s a pretty awful justification for subjecting these three human beings to further abuse. It really shouldn’t matter whether we have a way of legitimizing our ties to this land that the State of Texas can understand. Every second spent jumping through these bureaucratic hurdles is another second our ancestors endure agony in isolation. In response to all of these excuses, we continue to hold our heads and fists high at protests across campus with Indigenous students, community members from our tribe, and others in solidarity. If not for these relationships, which instill fear across UT Austin’s administration about a PR nightmare, we wouldn’t have had the opportunity to pray with our ancestors at all.

Recognition status isn’t the only barrier Indigenous communities face. Let’s look at a struggle closer to home for many of you reading this. In March of 2023, Dartmouth College announced the discovery of at least 15 Native American ancestors among its collections.[11] The announcement, like UT Austin’s, came over 30 years after Congress passed NAGPRA, putting the College out of compliance with the federal law requiring institutions to carry out inventories of remains and initiate their return to culturally affiliated tribes within five years of the law’s passage.[12] In an interview with New Hampshire Public Radio, Dartmouth curator and Osage Nation member Jami Powell puts this failure in the context of racist colonial rhetoric: “for a really long time, Native peoples and other people of color were not considered to be fully human, and therefore, available for study.”[13] Powell further emphasizes how NAGPRA’s five-year inventory deadlines further contributed to a lack of accountability for the College.[14] So, Powell and many other Native American faculty and students at Dartmouth were not surprised that their own institution, despite or perhaps following its founding in 1767 for the purpose of “educating the Indians of the Region,”[15] had justified the theft of Native American ancestors. The College’s negligence in response to the 1990 law reflects the inattentiveness to Native American humanity across the country, and the scientific racism underlying it, which holds our ancestors captive, sometimes, without us even knowing it.

The limitations of federal repatriation policies continue to expose themselves on the western coast of the United States. Member of the Pawnee Nation and scholar James Riding In positions his enumerated critique of this notion in the context of his community’s struggle with the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA).[16] He highlights that federal laws do not adequately specify what is to be done with “unclaimed, or unidentified remains,” which has left the fate of many bodies and funerary objects up to the institution.[17] In addition, the absence of legislation surrounding NAGPRA including enforcement and protection has let many instances of grave looting and similar crimes go unpunished.[18] Still, Riding In celebrates that at the time of writing his article in 1995, “the Pawnees alone have placed nearly a thousand bodies back in Mother Earth,”[19] and that number has likely grown significantly since then. In light of these contradicting realities, Riding In asks, “Will those with authority take steps to provide for a proper reburial for these bodies or will they allow the continuance of old practices and policies?”[20] I believe his question opens up a box of uncertainty not only about federal repatriation policy but about federal policy in general. Can we ever truly “repatriate” our ancestors, whose “cultural identities” have crossed textures of soil, bodies of water, and communities of people, when they are boxed in by the borders and regulations of a nation? Is it possible to pick or push these boxes open? Should we? 

I am sure about one thing. In all three of these instances, the colonizer’s playbook is the same. Academic institutions, municipal governments, and museums use and reuse different excuses to accomplish the same goal: to deceive. They say we are not Native American. They say they have no Native Americans while they pile up their bodies like timber. We are getting sick and tired of their lack of creativity.

A Living Body

The young Nishnaabeg woman carefully places the youngest canoe on her shoulders, carrying her out of the warehouse and into the woods.[21] Despite all of this weight, her bare feet grace the soil screen with such agility. She “sinks her with seven stones”[22] and pulls her little body out into the middle of the lake, cracked like the tiny fragments of children’s bones I remember reading about once in a newspaper article. The young ones stay with you. It is all so heavy.

But these stones are “just enough to fill her with lake.”[23] The waves rocking her rise to fill my own chest, forcing breath to come quicker. With every tear that falls out of my eyes, every croak that shamelessly echoes off the walls of the college dorm room of a campus that was never made for me, through the clicks of my keyboard and pens that spill colors over stark white pages, through the shouts at protests on UT Austin and Dartmouth’s campuses and the stories I write and share with my elders, I am made lighter. With each young person who hears my cries, I carry one less stone, because to each little canoe, it all matters. There is lightness all in this pain that shines like rays breaking through the surface of a lake. And sometimes, just when I want to give up, for a brief moment, I breathe, I float.

I think I am beginning to understand.

“kwe sings the song

and she sings back

kwe sings the song

and she sings back”[24]

Works Cited

Betasamosake Simpson, Leanne. “How to Steal a Canoe.” YouTube, uploaded by Revolutions per Minute, 28 Nov. 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp5oGZ1r60g. Accessed 1 Feb. 2025. 

Calloway, Colin G. “Introduction.” The Indian History of an American Institution: Native Americans and Dartmouth, University Press of New English, Lebanon, New Hampshire, 2010.

Furukawa, Julia, and Jami Powell. “Dartmouth Indigenous Curator ‘Shocked, Not Surprised’ with Recent Discovery of Remains.” New Hampshire Public Radio, New England Public Media, Hanover, New Hampshire, 12 Apr. 2023. Accessed 1 Feb. 2025.

Martinez, Carlos. Received by Dr. Mario Garza, 110 Inner Campus Drive, 1 Sept. 2020, Austin, Texas.

“Reburial.” Indigenous Cultures Institute, indigenouscultures.org/reburial/. Accessed 1 Feb. 2025.

“Repatriation.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, 2009, https://www.oed.com/dictionary/repatriation_n?tab=meaning_and_use#25810161. Accessed 1 Feb. 2025.

Riding In, James. “Repatriation: A Pawnee’s Perspective.” American Indian Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 2, 1996, pp. 238–50. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1185703. Accessed 1 Feb. 2025.

United States, Congress. Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation. Government Publishing Office, 16 Nov. 1990, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2010-title25/html/USCODE-2010-title25-chap32.htm. Accessed 1 Feb. 2025.

Footnotes

[1] Betasamosake Simpson, Leanne. “How to Steal a Canoe.” YouTube, uploaded by Revolutions per Minute, 28 Nov. 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp5oGZ1r60g. Accessed 1 Feb. 2025.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Betasamosake Simpson, Leanne. “How to Steal a Canoe.” YouTube, uploaded by Revolutions per Minute, 28 Nov. 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp5oGZ1r60g. Accessed 1 Feb. 2025.

[5] Ibid.

[6] “Repatriation.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, 2009, https://www.oed.com/dictionary/repatriation_n?tab=meaning_and_use#25810161. Accessed 1 Feb. 2025.

[7] Ibid.

[8] United States, Congress. Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation. Government Publishing Office, 16 Nov. 1990, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2010-title25/html/USCODE-2010-title25-chap32.htm. Accessed 1 Feb. 2025.

[9] “Reburial.” Indigenous Cultures Institute, indigenouscultures.org/reburial/. Accessed 1 Feb. 2025.

[10] Martinez, Carlos. Received by Dr. Mario Garza, 110 Inner Campus Drive, 1 Sept. 2020, Austin, Texas.

[11] Furukawa, Julia, and Jami Powell. “Dartmouth Indigenous Curator ‘Shocked, Not Surprised’ with Recent Discovery of Remains.” New Hampshire Public Radio, New England Public Media, Hanover, New Hampshire, 12 Apr. 2023. Accessed 1 Feb. 2025.

[12] United States, Congress. Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation. Government Publishing Office, 16 Nov. 1990, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2010-title25/html/USCODE-2010-title25-chap32.htm. Accessed 1 Feb. 2025.

[13] Furukawa, Julia, and Jami Powell. “Dartmouth Indigenous Curator ‘Shocked, Not Surprised’ with Recent Discovery of Remains.” New Hampshire Public Radio, New England Public Media, Hanover, New Hampshire, 12 Apr. 2023. Accessed 1 Feb. 2025.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Calloway, Colin G. “Introduction.” The Indian History of an American Institution: Native Americans and Dartmouth, University Press of New English, Lebanon, New Hampshire, 2010.

[16] Riding In, James. “Repatriation: A Pawnee’s Perspective.” American Indian Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 2, 1996, pp. 238–50. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1185703. Accessed 1 Feb. 2025.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Riding In, James. “Repatriation: A Pawnee’s Perspective.” American Indian Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 2, 1996, pp. 238–50. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1185703. Accessed 1 Feb. 2025.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Betasamosake Simpson, Leanne. “How to Steal a Canoe.” YouTube, uploaded by Revolutions per Minute, 28 Nov. 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp5oGZ1r60g. Accessed 1 Feb. 2025.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid.