CINCINNATI — An anthropology professor accused the University of Cincinnati of mishandling Native American remains, using them in teaching collections and undercounting them for a federally required inventory.
WCPO is not naming the professor, who is Native American, because he said he fears retaliation for his tribe.
He said he completed several inventories of Native American remains and cremations, as well as burial objects from 2007 to 2021, which he provided to WCPO. Instead of submitting the inventories to the National Park Service, he said department heads ignored them and once told him to stop including burial objects in his tallies, despite the federal requirement.
“Department head after department head, I continued to give this inventory, and talk about the department’s responsibility to the federal law,” said the professor who filed a formal grievance with UC in February. “I was ignored time and time again.”
In 1990, Congress ordered museums, universities and entities that receive federal funding to report all human remains and burial items in their collections that were believed to be Native American, and then return them to tribes and descendants.
Thirty-four years after the Native American Graves Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, was passed, many universities and museums, including the University of Cincinnati’s anthropology department, have yet to return anything.
In fact, the Ohio History Connection, formerly known as the Ohio Historical Society, has the largest collection of Native American remains of any institution or federal agency in the nation, with at least 7,167, as of September 2023, according to federal NAGPRA data.
The University of Cincinnati’s self-reported federal inventory shows at least 140 Native human remains and zero funerary objects, which the professor said is a drastic undercount of its true collection.
“Why is this not being accurately reported? Where are the missing bodies?” the professor said. “And where are all of the funerary objects? Why weren’t they reported?”
UC declined to make anyone available for an interview. But in a statement, Susan Allen, anthropology department head and NAGPRA director, said “much in these allegations is misrepresented, incorrect or nonsensical.”
“Under my leadership, we have instituted policies that fully conform with federal law, including performing NAGRPA-related efforts in consultation with federally recognized tribes,” she said, noting that she assumed responsibility for NAGPRA compliance in 2021, replacing the professor WCPO spoke with but is not naming.
“I am absolutely committed to being a good long-term partner with the federally recognized tribes with whom we have established partnerships as well as future tribal partners. We are resolved to be thorough in fulfilling both the letter and the spirit of the law by putting tribes in control of the process,” Allen wrote.
The professor, who has been at UC since 2007, documented some of its large collection of grave goods including shell beads, a bird bone flute, stone axes, bear teeth with drilled holes, a copper breastplate and copper earspools.
He gave WCPO copies of inventories and follow-up inventories he conducted from 2007 to 2021, at least one in conjunction with another professor.
When WCPO asked UC how many funerary objects it possessed, UC associate general counsel Brian Spiess gave this response:
“Because associated funerary objects are determined in consultation with federally recognized tribal partners, and consultation began only last fall, UC does not have a number to report at this time. The national NAGPRA inventory reported “0” AFOs, due to the time limit for reporting when the law was first enacted, but we know the collections for which UC cares include funerary objects. All potential funerary objects that we hold are associated with ancestors in our care and will be repatriated with them.”
When asked how many Native American human remains are being held by UC, Spiess did not answer. Instead, he provided WCPO the link to the National Park Service’s NAGPRA inventory site, which shows 140 human remains.
“These are our ancestors. They need to be reburied,” said the anthropology professor, who estimated that UC houses “close to a thousand unopened boxes” containing Native American human remains.
During the 2021-2022 academic year, he discovered that Native American human skeletal remains were being used for teaching biological and physical anthropology classes, and said he alerted his department head, who is Allen.
“They had labeled them with white paint and black numbers they were called lab numbers,” he said. “Imagine someone handling the remains of your mother who had passed away, and you did not give permission for that.”
He believes that adjunct and visiting teachers may be to blame for mixing Indigenous skeletal remains with other teaching material.
He also claimed that someone at UC mistreated a mummified Indigenous infant: “The flesh and skeletal remains … and associated funerary objects had been pulled apart and placed in separate plastic bags.”
When asked if UC uses Native American remains in teaching collections, Allen responded: “Since 2021, our policy prohibits research on ancestors or associated collections. While we are not aware of ancestral remains in our teaching collections, we are carefully reviewing them at the request of tribal partners.”
Following his complaints, the professor alleged that Allen took over the Court Archeological Research Facility and the NAGPRA compliance process.
“It’s the right thing to do”
While the Cincinnati Museum Center has a larger number of Native American remains on its federal inventory, with at least 448, it is moving through the return process much faster than UC.
The museum announced in January that it is ready to return 72 Native American remains and 335 burial objects that originated mostly from Hamilton County in places such as Clear Creek Park in Newtown, Sayler Park and Perin Village, which is now the Little Miami Golf Center.
Eight tribes jointly claimed the remains and burial objects: the Absentee Shawnee Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma; Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma; Miami Tribe of Oklahoma; Ottawa Tribe of Oklahoma; Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma; the Shawnee Tribe; the Osage Nation; and the Wyandotte Nation, according to the Federal Register.
Museum staff asked tribal partners if any would speak to WCPO for this story, but all declined. WCPO also separately contacted representatives from six tribes, who did not respond to requests for comment.
“It’s mostly a case of human dignity. It’s the right thing to do,” said Bob Genheimer, the museum’s George Rieveschl Curator of Archaeology. “We never had permission to dig them out of the ground, they shouldn’t be in our collections. They should be where they belong.”
He expects to return more than 100 additional Native American remains to tribes by the end of the year.
“We now have 17 tribes that we have consulted with, here in this building. They came here, we brought them here, and 13 more that we have consulted with mostly remotely due to the pandemic,” Genheimer said. “We make that pledge to our tribal partners as soon as we meet with them. That we want these to get back to you, to go where you want them to go. They don’t belong with us.”
Museum staff began taking inventory and building relationships with tribes many years ago to prepare for repatriation.
“I think we’re helped also by that we’ve been doing this NAGPRA work for nearly eight years. We have been able to make good progress. It’s not like we’re starting fresh today,” said Whitney Owens, the museum center’s chief learning officer.
Genheimer isn’t sure exactly how many Native American human remains are housed in the museum’s collections.
“That’s a really difficult question to answer. We know that we have hundreds of ancestors. We’re not finished with the documentation work yet to give you precisely (an answer),” Genheimer said.
The museum lists at least 363 funerary objects in its collections in its federal inventory, but Genheimer said that number could be higher.
“There are certainly hundreds of them. There are many that are questionable as to whether they’re funerary objects, and we will defer to our tribal partners for that sort of decision,” Genheimer said, noting that some donated items came in without much information. “We have whole pots that we know came from burials, but we just don’t have the burials.”
The Cincinnati Art Museum gave the museum center a 50,000-piece collection of Native American items in 1990, which prompted Genheimer’s work at the museum.
“It contains a number of what we would say NAGPRA items,” Genheimer said. “There are whole vessels … smoking pipes, things that I would highly suspect are NAGPRA and if I suspect they are, I’m going to treat them accordingly.”
Federal lawmakers are now trying to speed up the repatriation process, with new Department of Interior regulations that took effect in January, giving institutions just five years to update their inventories and publish them in the Federal Register. The rules also contain broader civil penalties and require tribal consent before burial items can be displayed.
“If you imagine that someone has dug up your grandmother’s grave and things that were buried with her, and without your permission put them on display for others. You can imagine how upsetting that would be,” Owens said.
That prompted the Cincinnati Museum Center to remove three shell-like objects from a gallery in January, and to cover a display case at the Geier Research Center when WCPO visited in February. Although the center is not open to the public, Genheimer said the shell and bone crescents in the display case could possibly be considered grave goods.
"We've reached out to our tribal partners to ask, 'How do you want us to proceed on these?' ... If they tell us they want us to remove them, then that's what we'll do," Genheimer said.
Meanwhile, the museum was prepared to return additional human remains to tribes in January but had to pause because they were part of a shared collection with another institution that wasn’t ready to return their portion.
“The tribes would rather do repatriation altogether,” Genheimer said. “We have no control over another institution, what they finish, but at this point, we need to get them out, the new NAGPRA regulations ‘say sorry we need to move forward with these, we’ve completed our work.’”
Genheimer said the museum shares collections with Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology and the University of Cincinnati.
The UC professor said the university and the museum share a collection from the State Line site on the Indiana and Ohio border.
“In 2007 I provided a complete inventory of all the human skeletal remains from the State Line site. They were ready to go in 2007,” said the professor, noting he gave his inventories to department heads many times over the years. “It went nowhere, absolutely nowhere. And I was told to forget about it.”
UC received a $100,000 federal grant in 2022 for NAGPRA consultation and documentation work.
"We are on track for completion of the inventory of ancestors from the State Line Site by the end of the grant period," Allen wrote in a progress support submitted to the U.S. Department of Interior on Dec. 29, 2023, and obtained by WCPO through a public records request.
The project period is set to end in September, according to the report.
To date, no notice of repatriation has been filed with the Federal Register.
“Delayed repatriation is delayed justice”
In April 2023, a dozen U.S. senators sent letters to the five institutions with the largest collections of Indigenous remains, asking why they failed to return them to tribes as federal law requires.
The outrage came after an investigation by ProPublica and NBC News revealed the nation’s most prestigious universities and museums kept collections with thousands of remains for more than three decades.
The Ohio History Connection received one of those letters, asking about its compliance efforts.
“Delayed repatriation is delayed justice for Native peoples. For too long, Native ancestral remains and cultural items have been unconsciously denied their journey home by institutions, desecrated by scientific study, publicly displayed as specimens, left to collect dust on a shelf, or simply thrown in a box and forgotten in a museum storeroom,” according to the letter from the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs.
The Ohio History Connection currently has more Native American remains than any other institution in the nation, but spokesperson Neil Thompson said it is working to return them.
“We completed our first consultation for eight counties in Northwest Ohio in summer 2023 and had additional consultation at our Tribal Nations Conference in Fall 2023. We are currently working on the next county group right now for a tentative consultation date of summer 2024,” Thompson said.
The reasons why repatriation may take longer than expected are complex, especially in Ohio.
“Ohio is a state with no resident tribes. Federal removal policy was sweeping and complete ... We are feeling those consequences still today, and any consultation with federally recognized tribal governments who historically would have been located in Ohio involves time, distance, and quite frankly, a history gap … these are very real hurdles in the process of repatriation,” Ohio History Connection Executive Director and CEO Megan Wood wrote in letter responding to the senators in June 2023.
Other hurdles, according to Genheimer and Owens, are tribes that lack the manpower to process the number of NAGPRA consultation requests they receive, especially now with new rules and tighter deadlines for return.
Harvard University still has the remains of 1,683 Native Americans from Ohio, according to data on the university’s website. Many came from the Madisonville Site in Mariemont, where Harvard archaeologists dug graves on and off for 40 years through 1912.
“Whole generations of archaeologists cut their teeth working at the Madisonville site,” Genheimer said, describing it as likely the most famous late pre-contact site in Eastern North America because of its size and artifacts.
Harvard did not return several requests. Federal records show that Harvard has at least 5,570 Native American remains, which is the third highest tally of any institution in the nation.
“Harvard has bigger collections of some of the (local) sites than we do,” Genheimer said. “We have no leverage. I can’t call up Harvard and say, ‘we finished our letters of inventory completion can you now do yours.’ It’s simply not going to work that way. We just have to complete ours.”
The UC professor believes the university is taking so long with its repatriation efforts because it wants to collect federal grant money.
“For them, there’s money to be made. There’s federal funding that can come from delaying the process,” the anthropology professor said, speaking about UC.
But both the Ohio History Connection and the Cincinnati Museum Center said the federal grant money they received has helped with travel costs, since many tribes are in Oklahoma. It also allowed the Ohio History Connection to hire a part-time staff member to help with NAGPRA.
“These funds are used to prepare collections for consultation. This means we put eyes on every ancestor and every NAGPRA item associated with the counties for that particular grant and place them together, per the direction of our tribal partners. Once the collections are complete and information is cross-checked, we hold a consultation with our tribal partners. As of this time, we have completed or started work on approximately 10 percent of Ohio's counties,” Thompson said.
But there are other hurdles, including finding a place to rebury Native American remains where they won’t be disturbed.
“Most of our tribal partners indicated that they would like their ancestors to be reburied as close as possible to where they came out of the ground. Some tribes have actually bought land in Ohio with the thought of doing cemeteries,” Genheimer said. “Ohio doesn’t have unmarked burial laws. It’s one of two or three states in the country that doesn’t have that. You can dig anything up as long as you own it or have privilege to do so, and they’re concerned about that.”
The Ohio History Connection has met with tribes about reburial on land it owns that is historically relevant, “with space to repatriate their Ohio ancestors if they choose to utilize the location,” according to the June 2023 letter to the U.S. Senate committee.
For the professor, there is some spiritual urgency to returning Native American remains to the Earth.
“That spiritual journey after we die is decomposing, going into the ground and becoming soil, creating nutrients for new plants to grow … and go on with the cycle of life, the circle of life,” the professor said. “What if your ancestor, what if your loved one, is in a box on a shelf?”
“The journey has been interrupted,” he said.
