Representatives of four Southwestern tribes have reburied human remains and other objects taken in the 19th century by a European researcher. They worked with the U.S. State Department and Finnish government for years to repatriate the items. KNAU’s Ryan Heinsius reports.
Last Sunday, leaders of the Hopi Tribe and the pueblos of Acoma, Zia and Zuni held a ceremony to return more than 600 items to what’s now Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado. The objects included the remains of 20 people and nearly 30 of funerary objects.
"For me, when we put them to rest I believe there was a sense of a reconnection to the land … When we did the final ceremony, of course, there was an uplifting, it seemed like something coming off my shoulders," says Hopi Vice Chairman Clark Tenakhongva who spearheaded the effort.
A Swedish scholar took the objects from present-day Mesa Verde during an excavation in the 1890s. They eventually became part of the ethnographic collection at the National Museum of Finland in Helsinki.
U.S. law at the time didn’t prohibit the removal of the items. But the incident played a major role in designating Mesa Verde as a national park, and in passing the 1906 Antiquities Act, which protects archaeological, cultural and historic sites on public lands.
