"The Milwaukee Public Museum has taken quite a few Native American artifacts off display, since NAGPRA took effect. Those items and others that were in storage are now in a back room where workers painstakingly categorize them. Because the items are considered sacred, I’m not allowed to view them.

“Our museum has been around for 125 years and how we think about things is very different than how they thought about collecting 125 years ago.”

That’s the museum’s Dawn Scher Thomae. She says under old practices, researchers would excavate sites of interest and keep or sell what was found there. Sometimes farmers would discover Native American objects and turn them over to museums.

“There were no laws concerning digging up graves or burial sites. It wasn't looked at the same way as it is now, as rather an atrocity,” Scher Thomae says.

“NAGPRA was created simply to give us the ability to own something: property.”

Kelly Jackson is with the Lac du Flambeau band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians in northern Wisconsin. She says the federal law gives tribes rights.

“The right to decide what to happens to our dead -- walking into a museum now, and talking to museum officials about what is the sensitive and appropriate way to deal with a child that they have wrapped in a plastic bag and written numbers on,” Jackson says."

Get the Story:
Returning Sacred Native American Objects (Milwaukee Public Radio 9/11)