In the early 1970s, a woman from Washington with Native American heritage saw a burial exhibit while visiting a Fort Wayne, Ind. museum.
The display – on loan from the University of Michigan’s Museum of Anthropology – featured remains of a Native American, believed to be from the southeast region of Michigan, posed with traditional burial artifacts.
The woman contended that the remains were highly offensive to her people. Hoping to garner media attention, she appeared on the Dan Smoot TV show.
Soon people from all over the country came to occupy and protest the museum’s artifact, according to Prof. Charles Brace, curator of the Ruthven Natural History Museum, which housed the Museum of Anthropology.
Some performed war dances and beat drums to prevent the museum from operating, Brace said.
“It was really quite disruptive,” he said. “The police were there with their searchlights everywhere to make sure nothing happened.”
The protesters, representing dozens of tribes across North America, demanded the return of the ancestral remains.
Brace said he and other museum staff were at a loss, fearing that collection pieces would be vandalized or stolen.
But James B. Griffin, then-director of the Museum of Anthropology, had a plan.
Unbeknownst to Brace, Griffin arranged for a squad of his students to conduct a midnight raid of the entire collection.
The clandestine removal freed Brace of legal obligation, enabling him to stand up in court and swear he did not know the whereabouts of the remains.
He later found out the collections had been stashed in pieces at Willow Run Airport and other locations nearby.
Brace said that once the controversy died down, the collection was regathered and is now stored in an undisclosed locked facility on University grounds.
Because of the controversy, burial displays are no longer on display at the museum, Brace said.
In 1990, the Native American Grave and Protection and Repatriation Act was passed, binding public museums, including the University’s, to return burial remains and cultural artifacts at the request of native peoples.
In a statement on its website, the Museum of Anthropology says its collections are in full compliance with the act.