For decades, Dickson Mounds Museum in Illinois displayed the open graves of more than 200 Indigenous people. Thirty years after a federal law required museums to begin returning remains, the statewide museum system still holds thousands.
Then Marquette and Jolliet showed up in 1673. That summer, Marquette chronicled the locations and customs of various tribal groups, including the Peoria and Kaskaskia. Archaeologists and anthropologists rely on the information in Marquette’s journals, but the missionary didn’t record the histories of any tribe he encountered. More than 300 years later, in 1995, some tribes would tell the Illinois State Museum curators that their oral histories describe their ancestors as mound-building people.
Leaders of tribes in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Michigan, Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa were invited to Dickson Mounds Museum. Some tribal members were returning to Illinois for the first time since their ancestors had been forcibly relocated. The museum had preemptively designated the rest of the remains — at least 5,450 ancestors excavated from at least 55 counties in Illinois — as culturally unidentifiable. All of them were dated to before 1673.
No tribe formally requested the return of remains that dated to before 1673. Many of the tribes invited to the museum viewed the ancestors as their collective responsibility. Connecting the remains to a specific tribe mattered less than ensuring they were reburied in the areas they’d been taken from. Every tribal leader told the museum that their ancestors should be reburied in Illinois.
And even though every tribe had said during the 1995 consultations that they believed the human remains in the museum’s collections should be reburied in Illinois, the reburial has yet to take place. Over the next 20 years, Armelagos published at least 15 papers based on his research using the remains, and his students produced even more. Their work on the Dickson Mounds ancestors helped convince the field that Native American remains had scientific value , and by 1990, the collection was dubbed by prominent anthropologists as “one of the most intensively studied skeletal samples in North America.
So, when the museum received a request in 1991 from Anne C. Stone, a Ph.D. student at Pennsylvania State University, the institution’s leadership was interested. Stone wanted to extract DNA from the ribs of 43 people excavated from Dickson Mounds and compare it to another group buried nearby. The process, according to her proposal, would require freezing bone samples to -112 degrees Fahrenheit, crushing them and soaking the powdered bone in an enzyme.
Today, she said, any of her research that involves destructive analysis is done in consultation with descendant communities. “The Illinois State Museum did not willfully ignore NAGPRA and associated rules in order to hold onto collections of culturally unidentified human remains,” said Styles.In a wooden crate from Piggly Wiggly, Pappenfort keeps letters written by his great-great-great-grandfather George Washington Finley. Finley was Piankashaw, an Illinois people with roots in the Miami tribe that merged with the Wea, Peoria and Kaskaskia in the 1850s.
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