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Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits - Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America's Culture (Paperback)
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Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits - Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America's Culture (Paperback)
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Who owns the past and the objects that physically connect us to
history? And who has the right to decide this ownership,
particularly when the objects are sacred or, in the case of
skeletal remains, human? Is it the museums that care for the
objects or the communities whose ancestors made them? These
questions are at the heart of Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits,
an unflinching insider account by a leading curator who has spent
years learning how to balance these controversial considerations.
Five decades ago, Native American leaders launched a crusade to
force museums to return their sacred objects and allow them to
rebury their kin. Today, hundreds of tribes use the Native American
Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to help them recover their
looted heritage from museums across the country. As senior curator
of anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Chip
Colwell has navigated firsthand the questions of how to weigh the
religious freedom of Native Americans against the academic freedom
of scientists and whether the emptying of museum shelves elevates
human rights or destroys a common heritage. This book offers his
personal account of the process of repatriation, following the
trail of four objects as they were created, collected, and
ultimately returned to their sources: a sculpture that is a living
god, the scalp of a massacre victim, a ceremonial blanket, and a
skeleton from a tribe considered by some to be extinct. These
specific stories reveal a dramatic process that involves not merely
obeying the law, but negotiating the blurry lines between identity
and morality, spirituality and politics. Things, like people, have
biographies. Repatriation, Colwell argues, is a difficult but
vitally important way for museums and tribes to acknowledge that
fact--and heal the wounds of the past while creating a respectful
approach to caring for these rich artifacts of history.
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