Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America’s Culture

Five decades ago, Native American leaders launched a crusade to force museums to return their sacred objects & allow them to rebury their kin. Today, hundreds of tribes use the Native American Graves Protection & 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 & 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, & ultimately returned to their sources: a sculpture that is a living god, the scalp of a massacre victim, a ceremonial blanket, & 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 & morality, spirituality & politics.

Things, like people, have biographies. Repatriation, Colwell argues, is a difficult but vitally important way for museums & tribes to acknowledge that fact—& heal the wounds of the past while creating a respectful approach to caring for these rich artifacts of history.