Sitka Tribe and Metlakatla May Request Return of 11 Ancestors and 16 Items in October

Four federal notices published over 15 days account for at least 11 Alaska Native Ancestors and 16 cultural items held by Princeton University, the Tongass National Forest, Ball State University and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Each names a date in October after which the holding institution may return what it has to lineal descendants or to a culturally affiliated tribe.

The Sitka Tribe of Alaska and the Metlakatla Indian Community are the tribes named.

Two of the four trace back to the same man. John Green Brady was a Presbyterian missionary who founded the Sitka Industrial and Training School and later served as Alaska's territorial governor.

Princeton's notice covers one Ancestor and two funerary objects, the items placed with a person at burial. The university says Brady acquired the remains and gave the Ancestor to Sheldon Jackson, and that letters between the two men show Brady collecting objects in Sitka on Jackson's behalf. The material reached Princeton in 1881, when the theological seminary donated Jackson's collection. Return becomes possible Oct. 9.

The Tongass notice is the largest. It covers the remains of at least 10 individuals and nine funerary objects, which the Forest Service says likely came from the village site of Krugloi Point on the southern tip of Halleck Island, and which it connects to the Sitka Tribe. One of the objects, the notice says, was "collected in approximately 1895 from John Brady's homestead residence" and placed in the Sheldon Jackson Museum. Return becomes possible Oct. 16.

The two notices published Sept. 23 concern objects and name the Metlakatla Indian Community. Ball State holds two totem carvings, one of them made by Edward Maitland in Metlakatla in 1896 and donated by a private owner in 1991; the other had been attributed to Tlingit people and was identified as Tsimshian during consultation.

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts holds a headdress frontlet, a raven rattle and a halibut grease dish. It bought the frontlet from a New York gallery in 2007 with no known provenance before that, and the rattle from a New York gallery in 2008. The dish was acquired in 1943 by Axel Rasmussen, a collector who had been superintendent of schools in Wrangell; after he died his collection was broken up, reassembled by a dealer, and the Portland Art Museum sold the dish to Richmond in 1955.

Consultation established that all three are Ts'msyen and not severable from the Ts'msyen people of Metlakatla. The notice also records that Metlakatla asserts the museum has no right of possession, a legal standard under the repatriation act that turns on whether an item was obtained with the consent of someone entitled to give it.

The tribes are named as consulting parties throughout and quoted nowhere. Metlakatla's assertion reaches the public record only as the museum's summary of it.

Whether any of this comes home is harder to learn than it sounds. The notices do not say whether either tribe has filed a request, and no federal record would show whether earlier returns were completed. The Park Service runs six databases covering inventories, summaries, grants, published notices and unclaimed remains. None tracks whether a repatriation actually happened.