‘You don’t just throw them in a box.’ Archaeologists, Indigenous scholars call on museums to better care for animal remains

(Press-News.org) Two years ago, Chance Ward began opening boxes of horse remains that had been shipped to the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History from other institutions around the country. What he saw made his heart sink.

At the time, Ward was a master’s student in Museum and Field Studies at CU Boulder. The researcher, who had grown up riding horses, was taking part in a large-scale study exploring the history of these iconic animals in the American West. But when he looked inside the packages, he sometimes found bones in disarray—horse remains were in bags and boxes with little care or cushioning and had banged together in transit, sometimes causing damage.

Ward is a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe in South Dakota and a member of the Mnicoujou and Hunkpapa bands of the Lakota Nation. Lakota traditions, like those of many other Native American groups in the West, place animals at the center of their spirituality and view them as relatives.

“You care for horses. You not only feed and water them, but you connect with them on a personal, spiritual level,” Ward said. “Even when they pass on, you still respect and honor them as non-human relatives. You don't throw them in plastic bags or boxes.”

Today, he’s leading a team of archaeologists and Indigenous scholars urging museums around the country to take a more respectful approach to caring for animal remains. It’s an example of what the researchers call “cultural humility,” an approach to engaging with different cultures that emphasizes self reflection, lifelong learning and recognizing power imbalances. The team says that museums must partner with Native American groups to rethink how they catalogue, store and display remains.

The group laid out its approach in a paper published this month in the journal Advances in Archaeological Practice.

“Now that Native people are getting into the museum field more, there’s been a greater understanding of things like representation and having control over our own cultures and issues that affect our cultures,” Ward said. “The old way of doing archaeological methods is outdated and in need of fresh perspectives.”

William Taylor, curator of archaeology at the CU museum and the study’s senior author, agreed. In 1990, U.S. Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). It requires institutions that receive federal funding to return human remains, sacred objects and more to Indigenous people.

But NAGPRA, which often doesn’t apply to animal remains, is not the only principle that should guide how museums act, said Taylor, author of the 2024 book Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History.

“We need to reframe the way we think about museums. Are they places where we treat archaeological objects as inanimate things?” he said. “Or are they places of living stewardship that come with responsibilities, some of which include connecting and listening?”

Life on horseback Ward, who now serves as the NAGPRA Coordinator for the State of Colorado and Office of the State Archaeologist, grew up on the Cheyenne River Reservation where horses were an essential part of his life. His father’s family owned a ranch, and every spring, Ward helped to round up cattle on horseback. He remembers when his dad first put him on a horse at age 8.

“There was no riding lesson. It was just ‘get on, and let’s go,’” Ward said. “I remember telling myself, ‘I’m not going to fall off no matter what’ because I didn’t want to disappoint anyone.”

Historically, the field of archaeology hasn’t always treated animals with respect. During many early digs, researchers overlooked the animal bones they found during their work. They often removed those objects from their cultural context and even threw them away.

Ward wants to change that. He noted that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach for how to treat the remains of horses, bison and more. There are currently more than 570 federally recognized Tribes in the U.S. and more recognized by the states, all of which hold their own distinct views on the living world.

But museums can begin by thoroughly documenting all the animal remains they have in their collections. Many institutions, Ward said, don’t even know what kinds of bones they have hiding in boxes and cabinets in rooms away from the public eye.

Study co-author Jimmy Arterberry, a tribal historian for the Comanche Nation in Oklahoma, sees the new paper as an urgent call to action. He acknowledges that most museums today are short on funding and staff. But he says institutions can still do a lot right now to change how they handle animal remains.

“Why are you keeping them if you’re not going to care for them?” Arterberry said.

Bison herd Arterberry and Ward agree that the most important thing museums can do today is listen to Native American groups. NAGPRA requires museums to obtain consent from Native American nations around how these institutions store, house and treat many archaeological collections.

The CU museum is committed to strengthening relationships and honoring knowledge. Taylor and his colleagues began with one of the museum’s most extensive collections: In the 20th century, archaeologists at the museum unearthed thousands of bison bones from an arroyo near the tiny town of Kit Carson, Colorado. Ancient peoples had hunted and butchered the animals following the end of the last Ice Age roughly 11,000 years ago. Archaeologists originally stored nearly 200 bison skulls in plaster or burlap casts. But decades later, many of those casts were fragmenting, threatening the remains inside.

Over several months, the team transferred the skulls to stable and open casts and arranged them safely on shelves in a new storage space. In February 2024, a delegation of Lakota elders traveled to the CU Boulder campus to meet with researchers and to see the bison collection. Chief Harold Left Heron spoke and sang a blessing in the Lakota language as he stood next to the remains.

“One of their suggestions was to keep these animals together as a herd in the museum, as they might have been in life,” Taylor said. 

Going forward, he said, the museum will continue seeking out opportunities to build community perspectives into the care of ancient animal remains.

Ward said that anyone can learn a lot by forming interpersonal relationships with animals like his own favorites, horses.

“Just being there with them, standing next to them, feeling them physically and spiritually is very powerful,” he said. “It takes both sides, the horse and human, to connect with each other and be comfortable—but not so comfortable that we dominate them.”

Other co-authors of the new study include Christina Cain, former collections manager at the CU Museum of Natural History; Dr. Joseph Aguilar at the Tribal Historic Preservation Office for Pueblo de San Ildefonso in New Mexico; Natalie Patton, a graduate of the CU Museum of Natural History; and Dr. Emily Lena Jones at the University of New Mexico.

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