Greater Cleveland resident Marie Toledo, a member of Jemez Pueblo, a federally recognized tribe in New Mexico, is proud of having worked with the Cleveland Museum of Art on a new collaboration with Native Americans.
Tribune News Service
CLEVELAND, Ohio — The Cleveland Museum of Art has installed opaque covers on three display cases containing Native American artworks and artifacts in compliance with new federal regulations that went into effect on Jan.12.
The regulations are an update of the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). The act, according to the National Park Service, was designed to balance respect for tribes and native Hawaiian organizations and the role of museums in preserving the past.
The new regulations require museums to obtain consent from lineal descendants, tribes or Native Hawaiian Organizations before exhibiting cultural items or human remains. Items covered by the regulation include funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony.
“Out of respect for the Native American tribes and adhering to NAGPRA, the Cleveland Museum of Art has covered display cases that may fit the NAGPRA descriptions until necessary consent is obtained,’’ Heather Lemonedes Brown, the museum’s deputy director and chief curator said Wednesday.
Marie Toledo, a Cleveland-area goldsmith, a member of the Jemez Pueblo community in New Mexico, and a member of the museum’s advisory committee on Native American art, praised the institution’s response to the new regulations.
“They’re taking it seriously and following the rules,” Toledo said Tuesday. “I’m pleased that they’re doing this and taking the steps. There are a lot of institutions that are not doing this.”
The 1990 NAGPRA act was intended, in part, to accelerate return of Native American human remains from museums to tribes.
According to ProPublica, the Cleveland Museum of Natural History has self-reported 476 Native human remains in its possession. Most of the museum’s exhibit areas are closed as it pursues a $150 million expansion and renovation.
The Cleveland Museum of Art’s action on Jan. 12 paralleled that of the Field Museum in Chicago, which also covered up several display cases on Friday. It was unclear Wednesday how many other museums had followed suit.
The new regulations followed five letters sent to cultural institutions in April by a bipartisan group of U.S. senators urging the University of California, Berkeley, Harvard University, Illinois State Museum, Indiana University, and the Ohio History Connection to comply with NAGPRA.
The senate committee on Indian Affairs said that the letters followed media reports that federally funded universities and museums had failed to return Native American cultural items and ancestral remains as required by NAGPRA.
The group was led by Senator Brian Schatz, D-Hawai’i, chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, and U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, vice chairman of the Committee.
Altered gallery
At the Cleveland Museum of Art, six display cases containing Native American objects are located in Gallery 231, part of the continuous east-west pathway on the north side of the museum complex connecting its East and West wings.
On Jan. 12, the museum installed the fabric covers on three of the six display cases, along with a sign saying that the museum, following the NAGPRA regulation, is “currently in the process of consulting with the relevant parties” about whether it can display the now concealed objects.
“Until such consent can be obtained, the items in this and other nearby cases will remain protected from public view,” the statement said.
Brown said the museum is reaching out to Native American tribal representatives to explore the issue of consent. She said she could not predict how long the three display cases would remain covered.
The six display cases contain 38 objects. The covered cases contain 20 objects from Southwestern, Northwestern, plains, and eastern woodland tribes. All were collected between the museum’s earliest decades of operation following its opening in 1916 and more recent decades.
Brown said that “at least half” of the objects in the covered cases could raise issues related to the new NAGPRA regulation. At the same time, the museum is convinced it has clear title to 17 of the 20 objects. The other three are on loan.
In some cases, Brown said, the museum may already have obtained consent to display them, but it needs to perform archival research to be sure.
Objects under cover
Photographs taken indicate that the display cases contained carved wooden bowls, a war club, daggers with elaborate hilts, masks, a ceremonial pipe, and other objects.
Among the objects are a late 19th- or early 20th-century Alaskan Tlingit club used to kill fish, a feast ladle, and a spoon. The ladle features a carved eagle, while the spoon’s handle features the heads of a wolf, a raven, and a beaver’s tail.
The two earliest objects in the cases were a pair of “birdstones” — small carvings in quartz and porphyry made in the Great Lakes region between 3,000 and 3,500 years ago. The stones are thought to have functioned as weights lashed to spear-throwers to improve control of the weapons.
The museum has chosen not to remove the items that may be affected by the new regulations from the display cases because it would leave them looking thinned-out, she said.
“You don’t want to show a case that’s half empty or half full,” she said.
For now, the museum is not removing images of the objects in the covered cases from its online digital catalog. Brown said the NAGPRA regulation is silent on whether digital displays should be taken down.
“The regulations are about exhibiting objects physically,” she said. “None of our peers are taking collections off their website. If we learn such and such an object should not be on view, then we will take the object off view online,” she said.
Stronger ties
The museum has worked in recent years to strengthen its relationship with Greater Cleveland’s Native American community. According to a 2021 update of U.S. Census Bureau data, Native Americans represent 0.3% of Cuyahoga County’s population or roughly 3,750 people.
Last year, the museum unveiled its first land acknowledgement, a statement saying it occupies land in a region from which Native Americans were forcibly removed during colonial settlement and the Westward expansion that followed. The statement was similar to ones shared by a growing number cultural and educational institutions across the United States, Australia and Canada.
A page about the land acknowledgment on the museum’s website states that the present-day Native American population in the region includes members of the Choctaw, Dine (Navajo), Haudenosaunee, Lakota (Sioux), Odawa, and Ojibwe nations, among many others.
Toledo said that many tribes have designated representatives to handle requests for consent to display cultural objects. “They’re schooled in NAGPRA,” she said.
Toledo said she was speaking for herself, not as a spokesperson for all Native Americans in Northeast Ohio. But she said: “I’m pretty sure that everyone in the community who is aware of NAGPRA is pleased that our art museum is being proactive.”
