By Cameron Cabrera
At UC Santa Barbara, the remains of Native ancestors rest not in sacred burial sites but in a repository inside the Humanities and Social Sciences building on campus —and the university is being asked to do more to repatriate them.
A panel of the experts spoke on the issue last month, in an event Repatriation Futures and Beyond at UCSB, hosted by the Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion and Public Life.
UCSB Religious Studies professor Greg Johnson, director of the Walter H. Capps Center, opens a recent panel discussion on repatriation of Native American remains.
Neil Carter, an Aboriginal elder who worked on repatriation efforts in museums, stressed the spiritual importance of restoring human remains to their descendants. “When you no longer hear the word repatriation, you will know that there is peace in the world,” Carter said.
The panelists described ongoing efforts to educate people and share their work on repatriation, to bring peace back to the Indigenous people and their ancestors.
While UCSB has made efforts to comply with federal laws such as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, attempts to return ancestors and objects back to Native people are far from complete.
Many museums and other institutions across the world are in the same situation, still holding Indigenous people’s remains and objects, while Indigenous groups’ efforts to bring their ancestors’ home continue.
Walter Echo-Hawk is an attorney and tribal judge of the Pawnee Tribe, who described the transcendent impact of repatriation for Native communities. Repatriation, he said, is a deeply-ingrained human right.
“A human right is the kind of right that no nation can take away because it comes to us from a higher source. It’s one of the strongest rights known to the human race,” Echo-Hawk said.
Indigenous people’s journey for repatriation of their relatives’ remains has been long and harrowing as many museums and universities have failed to comply with federal law. The federal government passed a national law for repatriation, known as NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act), 35 years ago in order to return Native American human remains and cultural items back to their rightful owners. Today, more institutions are beginning to adhere to federal law, due to social and ethical shifts that make it harder for them to ignore the demands.
Edward Halealoha Ayau, chair of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act review committee, tells a UCSB audience that education is the key to bringing peace to Native Americans and their ancestors.
“Repatriation is the return of ancestors [and their objects] back to their rightful homes,” said Greg Johnson, a professor of Religious Studies at UCSB who directs the Capps Center and serves on the university’s faculty council for American Indian and Indigenous Studies. Johnson said universities and museums illegally took ancestral remains and cultural objects from sacred burial grounds to be put on display.
Panelists stressed that education must drive the movement for repatriation.
Edward Halealoha Ayau, a repatriation practitioner originally from Hawaii and chair of the federal NAGPRA review committee, said it is education, rather than anger, that paves the way for the future. Gaining knowledge— not hiding in ignorance—fuels hope. He believes that through understanding, not fear, Native people will see justice and he that his message will spur audiences to inform themselves.
The panelists described their personal experiences and the moral and emotional effects this work has had on them.
Cristina Gonzales, a member of the Chumash nation and the Cultural Registrar for the Santa Rosa Rancheria Tachi Yokut Tribe, said the work is emotionally draining. “Repatriation work is very heavy. It is emotional, it is physical, it is mental,” she said. Gonzales explained that repatriation is an interruption of a Native person’s spiritual journey. Reburial ceremonies were never created in the past, because they were never necessary.
Dolly Kikon, a professor of anthropology at UC Santa Cruz, gave advice to the audience and said in order to support these efforts, they must first listen. She advised them to “open their ears and shut their mouths,” in order to truly understand and hear Indigenous voices.
Fellow panelist Echo-Hawk said that the way to truly listen is by learning the history and reason behind these repatriation efforts, namely the largescale desecration of Native burial sites throughout America.
“Every Indian tribe in the country…had been affected by grave robbing and the carrying away of their dead, funeral objects, and sacred objects being carted off to museums,” Echo-Hawk told the audience.
Halealoha Ayau said it’s a constant struggle to manage his emotions as he attempts to return ancestors to their rightful homes. He shared a memory from his work retrieving ancestors, recalling how he discovered a mummified infant had been taken from a sacred burial site and sold.
Native American repatriation experts (from left to right) Walter Echo-Hawk, Justin Richland, Cristina Gonzales, and Nakia Zavalla speak on a panel at UCSB to discuss the university’s need for improved efforts to repatriate Native American remains and artifacts.
“Be mindful of the spiritual realm, darkness will come…watch for that…do not let the enemy win,” Halealoha Ayau said.
Still he remains hopeful. “It is never a matter of whether our ancestors come home, the only question is when,” he said.
In April, Ayau and a group of repatriation advocates will go on a tour through Europe to retrieve their ancestors. First, they will travel to Berlin to finalize the return of two Hawaiian Goddesses. Then the team will head to Paris to finalize the return of 30 of their ancestors. And from there, they will fly to Belfast to repatriate the remains of two ancestors.
“The future is now,” Halealoha Ayau said,” leaving the audience with a call to action to get educated and be an active force to change the repatriation experience. “Teach the next generation.”
Cameron Cabrera is a third year Communications major at UC Santa Barbara. She wrote this article for her Writing Program course Digital Journalism.