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Barre museum begins identifying, photographing Native objects so they can be returned

The Barre Museum Association photographed the items in its collection this week as a first step towards returning them to Native tribes.
Nancy Eve Cohen
/
NEPM
The Barre Museum Association photographed the items in its collection this week as a first step towards returning them to Native tribes.

The Barre, Massachusetts, Museum Association is photographing its collection of Native objects this week. This is a key step before returning items to Native tribes.

Leola One Feather and Jeff Not Help Him from the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota are at the museum this week handling the items, and starting to identify them as they are photographed.

The objects include beaded moccasins, cradle boards used to carry babies and pipes. Sioux tribal leaders believe they were taken off the bodies of people who were massacred at Wounded Knee in 1890.

The photographer is John Willis, who previously made a portfolio of images taken at Pine Ridge Reservation, home of the Oglala Lakota Sioux.

Elizabeth Martin, the clerk of the Barre Museum Association's board, said it feels great to begin the process of returning items in the collection.

"All of these things will have to be offered to whatever Native Americans think they can claim them and then decisions will have to be made, not by us but by them — who it really belongs to," she said.

The museum has hired a consultant, Aaron Miller, to guide them through the process of following NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, a federal law. Miller is also the NAGPRA coordinator at Mount Holyoke College.

Museum officials have said the organization is not required to follow NAGPRA because it does not receive federal funding, but it wants to follow it anyway.

The NAGPRA process includes inviting tribes to consult about what happens next to the objects in the collection.

Native people have asked the museum to return the objects for decades.

Nancy Eve Cohen is a former NEPM senior reporter whose investigative reporting has been recognized with an Edward R. Murrow Regional Award for Hard News, along with awards for features and spot news from the Public Media Journalists Association (PMJA), American Women in Radio & Television and the Society of Professional Journalists.

She has reported on repatriation to Native nations, criminal justice for survivors of child sexual abuse, linguistic and digital barriers to employment, fatal police shootings and efforts to address climate change and protect the environment. She has done extensive reporting on the EPA's Superfund cleanup of the Housatonic River.

Previously, she served as an editor at NPR in Washington D.C., as well as the managing editor of the Northeast Environmental Hub, a collaboration of public radio stations in New York and New England.

Before working in radio, she produced environmental public television documentaries. As part of a camera crew, she also recorded sound for network television news with assignments in Russia, Guatemala, Mexico, Cuba and in Sarajevo during the war in Bosnia.
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