A Dartmouth Indigenous museum curator ‘shocked, not surprised’ with recent discovery of remains. Dartmouth College recently uncovered the skeletal remains of at least 15 Native American individuals in its academic collections. College officials have pledged to identify and repatriate the remains where possible. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, also known as NAGPRA, requires institutions that receive federal funds to catalog and potentially repatriate ancestral remains and cultural objects. Academic institutions and museums across the country took inventory of their Native American collections after Congress passed the law in 1990. But Jami Powell, the curator of Indigenous art for Dartmouth’s Hood Museum, says those inventories were often full of errors.
A new Children’s book celebrates the cultural significance of Indigenous hair. Carole Lindstrom’s mom never allowed her to have long hair when she was young, and she didn’t understand why her relatives all had short hair in family photos. “My mother had a photograph of my grandma and my two great aunts,” recounted Lindstrom, an award-winning Indigenous author of children’s literature. “It sat on our TV set and it was a black and white picture of them with their dark hair short – really short – and just chopped off. And they were sort of dressed in the same kind of clothes.” In the late 1800s, her relatives – along with hundreds of thousands of other Indigenous children over a century – were forced to attend one of the more than 400 federal Indian boarding schools in the United States. The schools were designed to culturally assimilate Native children, which meant cutting their hair, replacing their traditional clothing with uniforms, and prohibiting them from speaking their languages, among other atrocities and traumas.
Those are your headlines at this hour. I’m Colette Keith in the KIPI News center.