CLINTON, Okla.
Tribal leaders in Oklahoma are continuing their efforts to repatriate thousands of ancestral remains being housed in museum and university collections nationwide.
“Most of the elders will tell you the spirits of those who are there in those museums and universities are wandering,” says Lawrence Hart, executive director of the Cheyenne Cultural Center. “Those spirits will continue to wander until they are buried.”
The Cheyenne peace chief recently held a ground-blessing ceremony at the Clinton center, where a new regional cemetery for repatriated American Indians is under construction. The ceremony is part of a four-day educational conference titled “Cheyenne, Arapaho, Mennonite: Journey from Darlington.”
“I wanted to dedicate my time and energy to help repatriate those remains,” says Hart, 73. “So we’re establishing a regional cemetery and offering it for those listed as unidentified cultural remains.”
Since the creation of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990, officials have compiled a national database on American Indian human remains. Within that database, the bones of 111,238 people have been classified as “culturally unidentifiable.”
