Human Rights Reporting

Spring 2004 Student Work

Poisoned Indian Religious Artifacts a Relic of the Clash of Cultures

By Regina Woods

Arrow by arrow and bone by bone, Buffy McQuillen has been restoring her family's Native American cultural heritage by rescuing ancestral human remains and sacred objects from museum curio cabinets around the country. For the past three years McQuillen has been bringing these precious artifacts home to northwestern California among the towering redwoods between the Klamath River and the Pacific Ocean. In a small, yet significant way, the work she does is intended to help heal centuries-old wounds.

As the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act coordinator for the Yurok tribe, she has been planning an outdoor celebration to welcome home 11 new sacred artifacts from the Brooklyn Museum in New York. They have been part of its permanent collection since 1905. On May 21, however, one tobacco pipe and pouch used by medicine people in preparation for the White Deerskin Dance, the Jump Dance, and the Brush Dance; one deer hoof necklace, one pair of women's moccasins, two war caps used in the War Dance; one war slat armor; three fiber capes; and one set of arrows will be in Yurok hands after almost 100 years.

An atmosphere of precaution, however, will loom heavy over this home coming celebration. These long lost sacred objects have been poisoned, dusted with arsenic trioxide and other toxic pesticides while in the museum's care. Prolonged unprotected contact could cause respiratory problems, heart disease, nervous disorders, deformities in newborns and various forms of cancer according to some experts. In addition to a table for the cake, punch and paper plates, McQuillen will have to set up another table with gloves, laboratory aprons and surgical masks for those who wish to touch the contaminated artifacts.

"I feel conflicted," says 30-year-old McQuillen. "It's an achievement that's been squashed by the fact that I'm bringing something contaminated back to the tribe," she adds.

Ironically, the tobacco pipe, which once had been used by Yurok medicine people during the Jump Dance to ward off bad luck and sickness, has now been made potentially hazardous to the health of the present generation.

"If an object is in a museum, it's been treated with something that's toxic to humans," says George Hamill, Ethnology Collection manager for the New York State Museum in Albany.

Until the late 20th century, museums had treated organic objects such as feathers, leather and wood with arsenic, mercury and other toxic compounds in order to prohibit rotting and the growth of microorganisms. By doing this, curators and archeologists had hoped to preserve the artifacts for future generations of museum visitors. They probably never had dreamed that one day McQuillen and others would come around to recollect these sacred belongings and want to use them again. Unfortunately, once the objects have been treated with the chemical solutions, they can never fully be detoxified states an arsenic health and safety update published in 2000 by the National Park Service.

In 1990, the U.S. Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). Administered by the U.S. Department of the Interior through the National Park Service, the law entitles the 770 federally recognized Native American tribes, Native Alaskan villages and corporations and Native Hawaiian organizations to repatriate cultural objects and human remains from agencies and museums that receive federal funding. These agencies must publicize holdings of all relevant objects and must consult with appropriate Native American groups when uncovering human remains on federal or tribal lands. It is a significant way in which Native Americans have fought to regain legal control of their cultural and intellectual heritage and to resist ossification on museum shelves.

"These objects are how the Yurok equip the young people with the knowledge of the past," says McQuillen. Yurok cultural beliefs insist that sacred objects remain on ancestral territory and are not to be sold. "That's the law," she adds. If people want to learn about Yurok customs, McQuillen feels strongly that they should come to the reservation and learn from Yuroks. "It's really not something you can get in a museum in New York. After all, we're in Northern California," she declares.

She had requested the objects last year after reading the museum's inventory of Native American funerary, cultural and sacred objects published on the Federal Register. This March, she received a $8,500 NAGPRA grant to ship the objects from Brooklyn. The Yurok were one of four indigenous tribes recently awarded a collective total of $41,000 by the National NAGPRA Review Committee.

McQuillen asked Yurok elders for guidance when she had learned that the sacred objects were contaminated. She had wanted to be certain that the elders were aware of the potential hazards associated with bringing the objects back to the tribe. "They said 'It doesn't matter. They're supposed to be here,'" reports McQuillen, who says she shares their sentiments, but worries about the potential harm that may be done to those who are exposed to the objects.

Although McQuillen and other community members are deeply concerned about the potential danger, opinions in the scientific and museum community vary. Some museum professionals see nothing to be alarmed about as long as communities take precautions. "The quantities of arsenic sprinkled on the artifacts are not known to be hazardous," says Elizabeth Reynolds, chief registrar at the Brooklyn Museum.

Dr. Peter Palmer questions the authority of museum professionals who glibly make such ambiguous statements. Palmer is a chemist at San Francisco State University, and has led a half-dozen case studies on Native American artifacts repatriated from museums. "These objects have been treated multiple times with multiple agents," he says. "Museums don't have the expertise to determine if objects pose health risks." Although museum employees often wear protective gear when handling artifacts, this is primarily to protect the object. They are unaware of the affect of the chemicals on their own health.

The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry includes arsenic trioxide, mercuric chloride and DDT, once commonly used by museums to preserve artifacts, on its list of banned or severely restricted pesticides. It also indicates that direct skin contact with arsenic trioxide may cause some redness and swelling, but that skin contact is not likely to lead to any serious internal damage to humans.

Palmer, however, says that the Environmental Protections Agency and others have not set standards for individual objects. They usually measure pesticide levels in the air, soil or in water. This makes it difficult to determine how detrimental handling or wearing an object contaminated with arsenic trioxide or mercuric chloride can be. He adds that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration standards are also inept at determining the potential threat for the members of the Native American community because the standards were made for white males in their 40s. Age, sex, diet, family traits and state of health play critical roles in determining whether a person will be harmed from exposure. Elderly people and children, for example, have higher risks of harm than do other groups, he says.

Palmer considers the arsenic spot test kits available to museums unreliable and prone to interference. He says that results on one sample may vary depending upon the presence of other substances in the air. Additionally, the kits were made to test for arsenic in liquid samples and not for museum specimens.

Costs for conducting more elaborate and accurate laboratory tests are prohibitive, says Palmer. They can range from 100 to 500 dollars per artifact. Neither the tribes nor the museums have the funding to support this kind of testing. He believes federal agencies should share responsibility for conducting these tests. "It's a public health problem," he says. "Politicians aren't paying attention to this issue."

Given the uncertainty, the Yurok, like the Hopi in Arizona and the Seneca in New York have chosen to err on the side of caution. For the time being, the Yurok have opted not to re-incorporate these sacred objects into traditional ceremonies--one of the primary motivations for the repatriation. Instead, they will repack them after the party and store them in a private facility outside of tribal lands until tests can be done to definitively identify specific contaminates, their levels and their potential health threat.

Tribal members do not all agree that the objects should be isolated, says Peter Jemison, former NAGPRA representative for the Seneca Nation in New York State. Differences in opinion have divided some communities, he says. "Some resist the whole notion that the information about contamination is important," says Jemison. "They say something that was given to us as a helper would not harm us."

McQuillen says a representative from the Brooklyn Museum will escort the 11 objects back to the Yurok Reservation. These will be the first returned objects that the Tribe will keep. However, they are the second repatriation that the Yurok have received since NAGPRA was passed. The first were human remains from the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. The tribe reburied them on the reservation. McQuillen and other Yurok Cultural Department staff have been developing policies for safe guarding the community because eventually, the artifacts will become part of the tribe's future cultural center.

"Some how, some way I hope we can resolve the problem," says McQuillen. "Because bringing them home is the right thing to do."

The contamination of these artifacts is a double insult to the Native American people, says Palmer. "First the objects were taken from them and now they can't be used in the way they were intended," he says.