“The [Peabody] Museum has repatriated in all of those [NAGPRA] categories,” says Patricia Capone, curator and repatriation coordinator at the Peabody. According to Capone, the museum has returned hundreds of items. “The law dictates what is returned and what isn't… Harvard has given a great deal of support to implementation, and the university is in compliance with the act,” Capone says. “As a university museum, we try to be as well informed as we can.”

In 2001, the Peabody Museum repatriated a totem pole to Cape Fox in southeast Alaska. This pole had been taken from an empty Tlingit village in Cape Fox in 1899. A year before the totem pole was returned, the museum was given a red cedar trunk and commissioned Nathan Jackson, a traditional Tlingit artist, to craft a totem pole out of it. Now this newly constructed totem pole, named Kaats' and Brown Bear Totem Pole, stands in the Peabody, replacing the original totem pole that resides again in Cape Fox. To the museum, the totem pole is a representation of an ongoing friendship between the Peabody and the Tlingit people.

Work To Be Done

But while NAGPRA has resulted in the return of the totem pole and other cultural items that scholars may declare unethical to display, it may not be enough.

“There is no global convention that parallels NAGPRA in terms of the display, control of, and repatriation of these kinds of items,” Greene says. The UNESCO agreement addresses only illegally exported items, not items of cultural sensitivity. But, Greene adds, “Individual countries might in fact adopt these kinds of procedures. There's a particular sensitivity to the display of mummies and mummy remains in Egypt. Museums that actually have mummified remains that have displayed them have actually drawn back from that, I think in deference to Egyptian sensibilities.”

In time, an agreement similar to NAGPRA may be proposed to define an international code for ethical possession and display. But at the moment, no such law is in place, and museum directors and curators are left to make their best judgment calls.

But the obligation to return objects to their places of origin must also be weighed against the positive aspects of the museum environment. “I think that the purpose of an art museum is to allow people encounters with objects that are informed by the scholarship that happens in a museum,” says Sarah Kianovsky, curator of the collection in the division of modern and contemporary art at the Harvard Art Museums. “Rather than encountering an object without any context or without information, visitors to a museum get to take advantage of the accumulated scholarship of centuries of art historians and museum curators.” Balancing this with the duty to respect the communities from which these pieces are acquired is an ongoing challenge for curators.

“We have the responsibility to care for [our pieces] and make sure they don't suffer any further damage and that we maintain them and preserve them and teach with them and make them available the best that we can,” Moy says. “So I can only say [this]confidently about my institution, but I know that we do a good job of that.”

—Staff writer Abby L. Noyes can be reached at abby.noyes@thecrimson.com.