Debate rages over American Indian artifacts
 

By John Putman
Summer Forty Niner

Were your ancestors ever treated like this?

Packed in storage boxes and filed away in labeled plastic bags in cabinets in the Cal State Long Beach archaeology lab and storage room, the human and animal bones, shells, arrowheads, stone bowls, beads, flakes, ceramics and chipped stone await a new home.

Subsequent to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, federal legislation requiring that all institutions receiving federal funding return their collections of Native American burial remains and cultural artifacts to indigenous tribes, CSULB has come under considerable criticism for its curation of the collections.

Anthropologists, archaeologists and Native Americans have been critical of the university's conduct in at least four important instances, leading some to believe that the university has shown a pattern of unprofessional behavior that continues today.

Much of the criticism has  been directed at Keith Polakoff, the CSULB administrator charged with ensuring compliance with NAGPRA, and CSULB professor of anthropology Dan Larson, who is responsible for inventorying and curating the university's Native American archaeological collections.

Larson, who oversees the archaeology lab where much of the collections are stored, has come under fire for poor curation and the sloppy condition of the lab.

"It's a shambles in there,'' said CSULB anthropology professor Eugene Ruyle, "He's shown a wanton disregard for scientific standards of museum curation.''

Ruyle believes that Larson has delegated much of the duties of curating the collections to graduate students in the anthropology department, which some attribute to the mistakes that have surrounded the handling of the archaeological collections.

Lillian Robles, an elder and most likely descendent of the Juane­o/Acjachemen tribe, says the condition of the university's American Indian collections reflects a disrespect for her people and for the wishes of the committee to see them properly curated.

"I thought the university was insulting to us because when I saw the remains they were in cardboard boxes and silverfish were on them,'' said Robles, a member of the CSULB Committee on Native American Burial Remains and Cultural Patrimony. "It shows they don't have any respect for us as a people. They never consult us about what they're doing. They do what they want to do."

"They do have a problem with silverfish infestations,'' said Wendy Teeter, curator of archaeology at the UCLA/Fowler Museum of Cultural History. "Certainly the university has to bring that under control. It's something that must be taken care of.''

Polakoff expresses confidence in Larson's abilities, citing Larson's international reputation as a widely published archaeologist. While admitting that the university has made mistakes in its handling of the collections, Polakoff attributes much of that to prior CSULB anthropology faculty and poor record-keeping.

"We are dealing with collections that in past times have in some very important instances not properly been taken of,''' Polakoff said.

"As universities and museums have had to reconcile what they actually have with what they should have everybody is finding lots of discrepancies. The record keeping and the security that surrounds these collections more or less everywhere has been shown to be inadequate. We have legitimate embarrassments here, but it has proven to be a widespread problem.''

Ruyle disagreed.

"The collections have been really shoddily maintained,'' said Ruyle, whose been at CSULB since 1971. "Larson blames it on  the way that things were when he took over. My own opinion is that things have gotten worse.''

"The priority is with the issue of being sensitive, of treating human remains in the manner that you would want your loved ones treated,'' Larson said. "That's always been the way I've approached archaeology.''

The most egregious instances critics point to as reflecting a larger pattern of poor oversight and curation of the archaeological collections include:

The unannounced drop-off of 26 boxes of Native American artifacts and human remains at the loading dock of the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum in March 1996, an attempted return of a loan collection the museum had made to CSULB in 1966.

According to Karen Wise, the museum's associate curator, significant portions of the loan were missing and portions of other collections not belonging to the museum were included in some of the boxes that were infested with silverfish and not properly documented. The missing portion of the loan, a collection excavated from Ventura County which included human remains, has never been found.

The shipment of a collection of 200 human remains and artifacts to the US Army Corps of Engineers in 1993 that was actually the property of CSULB. The material was inadvertently included as part of a collection that was the property of the Army Corps of Engineers and was described by Jerald Johnson, chairman of the anthropology department at Cal State Sacramento, as arriving in "abysmal condition.''

In May, Polakoff and Larson drove to Cal State Fresno in Polakoff's Chevy Blazer to pick up the collection, which now sits in the CSULB archaeology lab, where it will be added to the university's NAGPRA inventory as soon as the lab can be accessed upon the completion of a current asbestos removal project in the building.

The seizure of two collections of human remains and artifacts and corresponding records from CSULB Professor Emeritus of Anthropology Keith Dixon's office and the anthropology department's archaeology lab in November 1993. When the collections reappeared, they had been mixed together and records had been lost, said Ruyle and Dixon.

While Polakoff believes that CSULB has shown improvement in its curation of the collections in the past few years, its actions have caused such deep mistrust in the American Indian community that many remain wary.