Remains of 5 Native Americans returned home 120 years after graves were looted

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• Geoff Bennett:

  A Native American tribe in Minnesota recently welcomed home five of its ancestors more than a century after their remains left the state.

  Their burial sites had been looted by a white landowner who took them to Connecticut. The remains sat in a basement until state officials stepped in, hoping to right a wrong.

  As Native American Heritage Month comes to a close, reporter Kaomi Lee of Twin Cities PBS has the story.

• Kaomi Lee:

  On this October day, despite the bitter wind and cold, a homecoming occurred. Some 120 years after being removed from their graves in Minnesota, five Dakota ancestors finally came home.

  Dozens of members of the Prairie Island Indian Community gathered at a burial site an hour south of Minneapolis. It was a sacred ceremony, one we were not allowed to film. The ancestors were carried down the hill as drums rang out. A ceremonial fire was lit and their remains were placed on scaffolding in the open air. This lasted four days, as is custom, until their final burial.

  Franky Jackson/Oyate Duta Obmani, Prairie Island Indian Community It's a feeling of excitement for many.

• Kaomi Lee:

  Franky Jackson is with the tribe's historic preservation office and was one of the organizers.

• Franky Jackson/Oyate Duta Obmani:

  What it allows them to come together as a community and put together this burial practice to welcome relatives back.

• Paul Maravelas, Lake Minnetonka Historian:

  It's an unusual story. There aren't many instances where human remains that were excavated in the 19th century have survived this long.

• Kaomi Lee:

  Historian Paul Maravelas researches the area where the ancestors originally were buried, Lake Minnetonka on the western outskirts of Minneapolis.

• Paul Maravelas:

  Lake Minnetonka has a heavy concentration of mounds. Some archaeologists claim that it's one of the most dense areas of mound-building in Southern Minnesota.

• Kaomi Lee:

  In 1875, an attorney from Connecticut named Carrington Phelps acquired an entire island on Lake Minnetonka. He renamed it Phelps Island and built a lodge. It was also home to two Native American burial mound groups. The lake was considered sacred to the Dakota and other tribes, who used it as their final resting place.

• Paul Maravelas:

  Almost 500 mounds at Lake Minnetonka that were counted and mapped in the late 1880s, most of these were excavated at Lake Minnetonka by 1890. There wasn't a sense that they should have been preserved, as we think we today.

• Kaomi Lee:

  And, also, were they novelties, souvenirs, people grave-digging?

• Paul Maravelas:

  Absolutely.

• Kaomi Lee:

  In 1902, Phelps lost ownership of the island. He had already moved back to Colebrook, Connecticut, a few years earlier. It's believed he took with him Native ancestors who were buried on the island.

  Their remains were given to the Colebrook Historical Society a decade ago when his descendants sold the house. According to the Colebrook Historical Society, the family made no effort to hide the fact that he brought the bones back after he destroyed the mound. Over the years, they showed them to people as if they were souvenirs.

  They eventually made their way to the Connecticut State Archaeology Office. That agency complied with a federal law called the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. It requires institutions that are federally funded or located on federal land to identify and return indigenous ancestral remains and objects to the Native nations to which they belong.

  But 33 years after it became law, anthropologists like Carlton Shield Chief Gover says compliance is falling short.

• Carlton Shield Chief Gover, Indiana University:

  Museums have too much stuff that has remained unanalyzed and unstudied since it was recovered in the 1930s and 1940s, and no one's touched it since. We still have so much that's remained unanalyzed.

• Kaomi Lee:

  A ProPublica investigation this year found that a handful of American institutions, including prestigious museums and government entities, still had not repatriated large numbers of Native American ancestors.

  The law doesn't address Native remains in private collections, as was the case with these ancestors. That helps explain why it took so long to return them to Minnesota.

• Franky Jackson/Oyate Duta Obmani:

  The relatives that are coming back now is just one example of the tribes working collectively to reconcile relatives outside of Minnesota.

• Kaomi Lee:

  Franky Jackson says bringing home their ancestors has been rewarding and worth the effort.

• Franky Jackson/Oyate Duta Obmani:

  To play just a small role in that is incredibly rewarding and satisfying, but more importantly for the Dakota Oyate that reside here in Minnesota.

  It is one of those ultimate acts of sovereignty, to be able to reclaim our relatives in this way.

• Kaomi Lee:

  For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Kaomi Lee in Welch, Minnesota.