Hover Park in Lima was once part of a Shawnee reservation.
Richard Parrish | The Lima News
LIMA — In the late 1800s, archeologists traveling through Ohio looted thousands of human remains and cultural artifacts from Native American grave sites.
The artifacts—often looted by the children and grandchildren of settlers who forcefully removed Native peoples from Ohio in the first half of the 19th century—were used for research and traded around the world, soon decorating museum shelves and the homes of private collectors like James Pillars, who became the Allen County Museum and Historical Society’s first curator in 1909.
Pillars “had been bitten by the Indian bug,” Frank G. Love wrote in 1976, according to a profile of Pillars published by The Lima News and Allen County Museum and Historical Society last year.
“Somehow, he’d learned that farmers in the County frequently turned up Indian relics as they plowed and turned the earth, and this bit of information ignited the lad’s imagination and, in the end, became the seed from which the present-day (Allen County Historical) Society grew,” Love wrote, describing the curator’s “driving passion” in life.
Today, the Allen County Museum is tasked with returning the remains of at least 73 Native Americans and 28 other belongings taken from their burial grounds to tribal nations or their descendants, a ProPublica analysis of federal records found.
The ancestral remains were likely donated to museum in the last 50 years, rather than at the museum’s founding, and have since been transferred to The Ohio State University-Columbus campus for storage, Director Amy Craft-Klassen said.
But a federal law adopted in 1990, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, requires federally funded government agencies, universities and museums like the Allen County Museum to document and repatriate any human remains and artifacts taken from Native American grave sites.
A ProPublica investigation found that the remains of more than 110,000 Native American, Native Hawaiian and Alaska Natives’ ancestors have not been returned.
‘They became objects’
“A lot of times there’s a lack of sensitivity to what’s really happening, because they became objects instead of ancestors,” said Paul Barton, director of cultural preservation for the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma, one of several federally recognized tribes whose ancestors once lived in this region.
“They’re not just artifacts,” Barton said. “They’re not just objects.”
In 1817, the Shawnee tribe were forced from their land into reservations established at Hog Creek, Wapakoneta and Lewistown, so settlers could move in. The tribe was forcefully removed from Northwest Ohio 15 years later.
Remains from at least 2,400 ancestors have been repatriated to the Eastern Shawnee tribe since 1990, ProPublica found, allowing tribal members to rebury their ancestors in their ancestral lands.
Still, ProPublica estimates that institutions as varied as the Ohio History Connection, Harvard University and University of Tennessee’s Knoxville campus are still holding onto the remains of at least 18,200 Native Americans whose remains were taken from counties of interest to the Eastern Shawnee tribe.
‘These are my ancestors’
Seven years ago, the Ohio History Connection, formerly known as the Ohio Historical Society, hired its first director of American Indian relations.
The historical society possesses the remains of at least 7,100 Native Americans and 110,000 belongings removed from their grave sites — the third-largest collection subject to NAGPRA in the U.S. Only 17 ancestral remains have been returned since 1990, ProPublica found.
“I don’t know any of these individuals that are sitting in cardboard boxes on museum shelves that are collecting dust, because they’ve been gone a while,” said Alex Wesaw, director of American Indian relations for the Ohio History Connection and a member of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi tribe.
“But these are my ancestors,” Wesaw said. “These are the ancestors of individuals that I know that work for tribes, and I think this is a human rights issue. No one should be left on the shelf or publicly displayed at all.”
‘Culturally unidentifiable’
In the past, Wesaw said, the OHC classified the ancestral remains and artifacts as culturally unidentifiable so the historical society would stay compliant with the law, a standard which Wesaw said has “been abused by other institutions.”
But the OHC has since imposed a moratorium on research access to ancestral remains and is working to establish a burial grounds in Ohio where tribes can return their ancestors to the land they were removed from. Newer NAGPRA regulations have made repatriation easier too by eliminating the cultural unidentifiable designation, Wesaw said.
The historical society is making connections between ancestors and tribal nations based on geography, at a minimum, providing an example for other institutions seeking to repatriate ancestral remains and personal belongings still in their possession.
“We have a lot of work that we need to do to get caught up and get these individuals back into the ground so that they can rest in peace and not be disturbed anymore,” Wesaw said.
‘Back on their journey’
The Allen County Museum has repatriated personal items taken from Native American communities in the past, such as in 1998, when members of the Nez Perce tribe traveled to Lima to retrieve a knife sheath, child’s dress and other personal artifacts donated to the historical society a century earlier by Lt. Harry Lee Bailey, who took the items while traveling through a Nez Perce village.
The museum is now consulting with tribal nations to identify the origin of beaded purses and other cultural artifacts in its possession, Craft-Klassen said.
While museum staff have not yet identified which tribal nations should receive the ancestral remains, Craft-Klassen said, collaboration is the “long-term goal” so that each tribal nation’s culture is “respected and thought of fully” in the process.
It’s a time-consuming process. But for Barton and other descendants, the opportunity to repatriate their ancestors is rewarding and sacred.
“When you do a reinterment, there is a feeling of accomplishment and comfort knowing that you’ve helped these ancestors return to the earth and they’re back on their jouney,” Barton said, “and you hope with these efforts we take that they’ll be secure and won’t be disturbed again.”
