An Alaska Native museum in the state’s Kodiak Archipelago is using a nearly $100,000 federal grant to build a private online database to help unite local tribes with their ancestors.
The Alutiiq Museum—a non-profit organization whose mission is to preserve and share the culture of the Alutiiq Alaska Native tribal people— will lead the two year project, called ‘Angitapet’, meaning ‘We Are Returning Them’ in Alutiiq/Sugpiaq.
The museum has identified at least 12 institutions in the US that hold the remains of at least 168 Kodiak Alutiiq ancestors, said Amanda Lancaster, the museum’s Curator of Collections and repatriation coordinator since March 2017. Those ancestors are subject to return under a human rights law called NAGPRA, or the native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, which requires museums and universities holding Indigenous human remains and artifacts to catalog those remains and return them to their tribal nations.
Lancaster said that the number of Kodiak Alutiiq ancestors held in collections across the country is likely to go up, but the current figure comes from federal data museum staff has culled itself, and from personally reaching out to more than 70 institutions across the country.
“One of the biggest hurdles with NAGPRA is that there is no central database,” Lancaster told Native News Online. “So tribes will do all this work to possibly repatriate the ancestors, and then find out they were claimed 10 years ago.”
