repatriation
noun [U] /riˌpeɪ·triˈeɪ·ʃən
to send or bring someone or something back to the country that person or thing came from
What is repatriation? The word’s etymology suggests a post-classical Latin reference to returning something or someone to the homeland, the country of one’s father. Yet it is given in a feminine form—patria—and thereby refers to a motherland as well. Thus, the word is, first and foremost, about land. It represents a landed definition of ownership, consanguinity, identity, association.
If we use it to refer to an individual, then we mean that person is of the place, not from it.
In 1990, however, the word gained new significance with the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
Known in US Civil Code as 25 U.S.C. 3001 et seq., this legislation “provide[s] for the protection of Native American graves.” It does so by mandating the timely and proper return of human remains to their homeland:
“SEC. 7. REPATRIATION. (a) REPATRIATION OF NATIVE AMERICAN HUMAN REMAINS AND OBJECTS POSSESSED OR CONTROLLED BY FEDERAL AGENCIES AND MUSEUMS.– (1) If, pursuant to section 5, the cultural affiliation of Native American human remains and associated funerary objects with a particular Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization is established, then the Federal agency or museum, upon the request of a known lineal descendant of the Native American or of the tribe or organization and pursuant to subsections (b) and (e) of this section, shall expeditiously return such remains and associated funerary objects.”
The law goes further. It requires that care also be taken with things that are considered part of a Native community’s cultural patrimony:
“which shall mean an object having ongoing historical, traditional, or cultural importance central to the Native American group or culture itself, rather than property owned by an individual Native American, and which, therefore, cannot be alienated, appropriated, or conveyed by any individual regardless of whether or not the individual is a member of the Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization and such object shall have been considered inalienable by such Native American group at the time the object was separated from such group.”
In 1990, human remains were at the center of debate. Members of groups like the American Association of Museums and the Society for American Archaeology proffered dire predictions about the death of archaeology as a science if repatriation went forward as the law demanded. For these experts, bones were data, essential keys to understanding human development and demography. For Native peoples, by contrast, the some 18, 000 indigenous body parts housed in the National Museum of Natural History represented the plunder of colonialism, rendering many museums little more than charnel houses, bearing cold witness to the 19th-century genocide of American Indians.
National Museum of Natural History. Item E419102A-0, “Blackstone pipe bowl, pipe stem. Blackfoot (Niitsitapi), Piegan.
In the past few years, however, Native scholars and activists have increasingly turned their attention to the broader category of “cultural patrimony” in their search for what Osage scholar Robert Warrior has called “intellectual sovereignty.” Reburying the bodies of one’s relations was critical to restoring dignity to Native peoples, but that was just the beginning. As Warrior points out, “the process of sovereignty, whether in the political or intellectual sphere, is not a matter of removing ourselves and our communities from the influences of the world in which we live.” In some ways, Warrior was speaking to a new generation of Native intellectuals who had helped bury the dead in the 90s and now sought new claims of ownership in the intellectual sphere.
But Native American intellectual traditions—as varied as they are across the more than 500 nations now extant in the United States—come down to us “primarily in the form of religious movements that did not produce books, publish newspapers or create national organizations” (Tribal Secrets, 11). The material “remains” of these important traditions of resistance are thus embodied in the very objects of cultural patrimony that NAGPRA defines as “inalienable” and central” to a Native community’s being. As scholars like Warrior begin to reclaim this indigenous past, they are developing new strategies for unlocking the “patrimony” of archives. Because he is a literary critic, Warrior conceives of his work in terms of non-fiction texts written by American Indians in the period before World War II. He advocates an interpretive approach for repatriating this past as “a process that highlights the production of meaning through the critical interaction that occurs between a texts as a writer has written it and a text as readers read it” (People and the Word, xiv).
In future blogs, I will put these ideas into practice, moving from human remains to objects of cultural patrimony—including written texts—to discover how the law and the work of Native scholars like Robert Warrior offer methods for the intellectual repatriation of material practices to the societies from which they were taken.
Suggested Reading
McKeown, C. Timothy, In the Smaller Scope of Conscience: The Struggle for National Repatriation Legislation, 1986-1990. (University of Arizona Press, 2012).