Adam McPhail, Contributing Photographer

On March 26, the renovated Peabody Museum of Natural History opened. In addition to making the museum more accessible to Yale and outside visitors, the updated museum aims to better acknowledge its complicated history. 

As of last fall, the museum has identified 850 Native American ancestor remains for which the process of consultation or repatriation has either not begun or is currently in progress, according to Associate Director of Marketing and Communications for the Peabody Museum Steven Scarpa. Scarpa added that the Peabody has repatriated 450 ancestral remains to 37 federally-recognized Native American tribes, Native Alaskan villages and Native Hawaiian organizations and 460 cultural items to 44 of these communities.

In January, the Biden administration issued new federal regulations designed to speed up the process of returning human remains, funerary objects and other items to Native American tribes in the U.S. — an effort that formally began with the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, in 1990. Under the new regulations, museums and federal agencies must adhere to a five-year deadline to complete consultations and to update inventories on any human remains and funerary objects within their collections.

“We can’t walk away from the history of this place,” Director of the Peabody Museum David Skelly said. “A big part of my job as director is figuring out what we need to do; fixing this is not the right word, we have to address it, and we have to be listening more than we’re talking.”

Scarpa wrote that the Peabody is committed to working with Native American and Indigenous communities to meet its “goal of culturally responsive collection stewardship” — and that it has done so since the passage of NAGPRA in 1990.

He added that any ongoing consultations are kept confidential out of respect for the privacy of the communities involved. Skelly told the News that he and other staff members have been interacting with Indigenous communities whose ancestors’ remains or cultural objects are held in the Peabody’s collections.

Not on display: The Red River Meteorite

Skelly also said that because of the new federal regulations, which require Yale to obtain approval from tribes before displaying or researching cultural items, the Red River Meteorite — an estimated 1,600-pound meteorite taken from Native land in Texas and donated to the University in 1808 — was not put out on display for the museum’s recent opening. 

If the meteorite does go on display, he added, the large rock once venerated by Pawnee people for its curative powers will be embedded in soil from where it originated, and people will be allowed to leave offerings next to it — steps the museum formed in consultation with the tribes the rock was originally associated with, per Skelly. 

Collection Manager for the Native North American and Indigenous Collection at the Peabody Royce Young Wolf is leading the consultations for the meteorite. She wrote to the News that there has previously not been any “culturally based consultation” for the rock and that her collaboration efforts remain in the “beginning stages.” Wolf, who is also assistant curator of Native American Art at the Yale University Art Gallery, declined to comment on any specific details behind the collaboration “out of respect for this culturally sensitive process.”

According to Scarpa, the gallery which houses the Red River meteorite will open in April but did not specify a date.

“The new [NAGPRA] regulations mean we have additional people we have to talk to at those tribes, and that’s going to take time,” Skelly said. “And that’s not because we don’t want to do that, it’s because we want to and we have to do it right.”

Students weigh in on Peabody’s repatriation efforts

Kala’i Anderson ’25, who is Native Hawaiian, first became interested in Yale’s repatriation efforts upon hearing from the Peabody’s Repatriation Registrar Jessie Cohen during a biological anthropology course he took as a first year. Anderson said he contacted Cohen and met with her on West Campus to continue discussing the remains and other cultural artifacts in the Peabody’s collections. 

During his sophomore year, Anderson said Cohen and newly-arrived assistant professor of Native and Indigenous studies Hi’ilei Hobart, also Native Hawaiian, invited him and two other students — Connor Arakaki ’26, a staff reporter for the News, and Joshua Ching ’26 — to form a team tasked with repatriating ancestral remains to Hawaiʻi.

Anderson said that Hobart and the students involved handled “the more cultural or religious aspects” of the repatriation but stressed that “a large amount of effort” came from them. He added that Yale should hire more repatriation experts to shift the “burden” of repatriation back to the institution, as opposed to having it fall on students and faculty members.

Still, Anderson described Cohen’s position as a “tough job” and said that Yale is off to a “decent start” with its repatriation efforts, but he hopes the University becomes more transparent about the artifacts they currently hold and about any repatriation efforts currently underway.

According to Scarpa, although Cohen is the only employee currently handling repatriation efforts, two additional positions will be added, and the museum is “actively searching” for the second position so that one of those roles will be filled by this summer. 

With the new five-year plan mandated in January, Anderson said it is certainly a positive step. 

“That is definitely good: trying to encourage all of these universities and public institutions to repatriate as much as they can within the next five years,” Anderson said. “Do I think it’s realistic? Probably not because repatriation work is tediously slow.”

Madeline Gupta ’25, formerly the head of Yale’s chapter of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society, described the University’s ongoing repatriation efforts as “successful” but said she hopes Yale continues to create awareness about the issue. 

She added that NAGPRA “is not really a call to action,” but that it instead urges tribes to craft a “compelling case” for objects they wish to be repatriated. She said that this might make it difficult for items with stories passed down orally but for which legal documents might not exist. 

Gupta also said that she hopes Yale “elevate[s] Native leaders” from across the country in these conversations.

“Because it puts the action in the hands of the tribes, it is sometimes very difficult for NAGPRA to work effectively in situations where a lot of this history might have been erased in the past,” Gupta said. “I’ve seen a lot of articles and excitement about the Museum and seeing dinosaurs and things, and it would be really lovely if there was some kind of acknowledgement of the fact of where these things come from.”

Anderson said that he is skeptical of the Peabody’s current figures on the number of items that await repatriation, but that he understands the Peabody has large collections, which may mean that the museum is “not able to account for everything.” Gupta said that she thinks Yale’s efforts to enter into negotiations with tribes is “really wonderful” but that she, too, wonders just how many ancestral remains and cultural items Yale actually has, given the museum’s large collections size. 

Previous repatriation efforts

The Peabody and Yale’s complex history with repatriation stretches back to the early twentieth century.

In 2012, thousands of artifacts were returned to Peru following years of negotiation that culminated in a Memorandum of Understanding between the Peruvian officials and Yale in November 2010. The objects were first excavated nearly 100 years earlier and shipped to the U.S. during the Yale Peruvian Expedition. The memorandum paved the way for Yale’s repatriation of over 5,000 artifacts that the Peruvian government claimed were wrongfully kept by the University.

In October 2022, Hobart and her team of three students returned the iwi kupuna, the Hawaiian term for ancestral bones, which had been contained in the Peabody’s collection since the 1870s, back to Hawaiʻi and included a number of mandibles and teeth. Hobart and the students met with cultural practitioners over Zoom to memorize four anchor prayers — referred to as pule — and other chants to be performed during the repatriation ceremony that would take place on West Campus that month. 

The Peabody had previously repatriated iwi kupuna from its collections in 1994 and 2014, but 2022 marked the first time such efforts were led by Yale community members. Furthermore, the remains repatriated in 2022 were items initially going to be returned with a larger group of iwi kupuna in 2014 but became separated and remained at Yale.

At a campus ceremony in Woodbridge Hall in November 2021, the University returned hundreds of cultural artifacts — some of which had been in the museum’s possession for over a century — to the Mohegan Tribe, one of two federally recognized tribes in Connecticut. During the summer months of 2018, the Peabody returned the remains of seven Maori and one Moriori individuals to a visiting delegation from the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, which consisted of two repatriation officials and two Maori elders.

The Peabody Museum is located at 170 Whitney Ave.