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Things have changed in a major way at the American Museum of Natural History.
AMNH closed its galleries for the Eastern Woodlands and the Great Plains and covered other displays of Native American artifacts over the weekend. The move was a result of new federal rules for the repatriation (or return) of Native American remains, funerary objects and other sacred items. It’s a law that has been a long time coming—since 1990 with the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, according to the New York Times.
AMNH’s removal of these items will mean 10,000 square feet of museum space is off-limits right now, according to the Times.
Other museums have fallen into compliance, like the Field Museum in Chicago, which covered some display cases, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, which said it would return funerary items, and the Cleveland Museum of Art, which covered up some cases, the Times says.
Specifically at AMNH, items related to the Iroquois, Mohegans, Cheyenne and Arapaho, from the birchbark canoe of Menominee origin to darts that date as far back as 10,000 B.C., are now not available to the public view.
This isn’t the first time the museum has returned Native American objects. In the past decades after facing criticism, it has repatriated the remains of about 1,000 people to tribal groups.
It still has about 2,200 Native Americans and thousands of funerary objects, according to the Times, though it said last year it’ll remove human bones from public display and improve their storage situation.
Museums have until 2029 to prepare these remains and their burial items for repatriation.
“Some objects may never come back on display as a result of the consultation process,” the museum’s president Sean Decatur told the Times. “But we are looking to create smaller-scale programs throughout the museum that can explain what kind of process is underway.”