From Controversy to Collaboration: NAGPRA Practice and Repatriation at Dickson Mounds Museum

Summary

This is an abstract from the "In Search of Solutions: Exploring Pathways to Repatriation for NAGPRA Practitioners (Part IV): NAGPRA in Policy, Protocol, and Practice" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Dickson Mounds Museum (DMM) in central Illinois has been ground zero for the intersection of archaeological practice, Native American rights, and the responsibilities of a state museum. For over sixty years, DMM presented viewing of an open excavation of over 250 Mississippian Period (AD 1100-1300) burials left in situ. Additional burials were excavated and removed prior to construction of the current building, which opened in 1972. After a national-level controversy embroiled DMM, the burial display was closed in 1992 and sealed beneath a cedar floor. Nonetheless, the site remains an open wound for Native people and represents a critically unfinished historical baseline for Native American relations in Illinois and beyond. The Illinois State Museum (ISM) is practicing decolonizing methodology as it shapes its future and reenvisions museum spaces in partnership with Native peoples. Building trust, and hopes of reconciliation, necessarily begins with repatriation of more than 1,100 Native American ancestors and 6,300 funerary objects from the Dickson Mounds site. Since 2020, the ISM and DMM have been working with a consortium of Tribal Nations to develop processes that facilitate respectful repatriation. This poster shares what we have learned as NAGPRA practitioners and museum professionals during this project.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• In Search of Solutions: Exploring Pathways to Repatriation for NAGPRA Practitioners (Part IV): NAGPRA in Policy, Protocol, and Practice   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38214.0