Dancers moved their dancing fans to the rhythmic beat of the Yup’ik Blessing Song in the Igiugig school gymnasium earlier this month. The event was hosted to welcome more than two dozen members of the Smithsonian Natural Museum of History Advisory Board to the village of Igiugig.
The Smithsonian repatriated the remains of 24 Igiugig ancestors to the community in 2017. They returned to the village this month to see the impact that the repatriation has had on the community.
April Hostetter, a staff member at the village council, was one of many to welcome the board and host the event. She said the visit was meaningful for the community and the museum.
“[It was] an event to show the Smithsonian Advisory Board what a rural Alaskan village is like and to share with them that who we are as indigenous people, as people living in Igiugig, is important and that this repatriation was important. That they're headed in the right direction,” Hostetter said.
The remains were uncovered in the now abandoned settlement of Kaskanak by Smithsonian anthropologist Aleš Hrdlička on his trip to Bristol Bay in 1927 and 1928.
The village was abandoned when Hrdlička passed through after a pandemic killed all but 3 people in 1919. Hostetter said that when descendants returned to resettle seven miles downriver from the original village, they found their ancestors' remains missing.
Hostetter is the granddaughter of one of the 3 pandemic survivors. She says knowing that the ancestors' remains were in a museum in the nation’s capital was a weird experience.
“Research was done on these remains. Just reading about our people being studied was uncomfortable, but knowing that they're not thousands of miles away, sitting in probably like a sterile environment that's not connected to anything that they would have known, is healing,” Hostetter said.
The Smithsonian says that throughout history they collected a total of 4231 Alaskan catalog remains. The exact number of bodies is unknown because catalog remains sometimes include multiple individuals. Kirk Johnson is the Sant Director at the Smithsonian.
“The Smithsonian collected bodies pretty aggressively in the early part of the century, especially in the teens and 20s and 30s,” Johnson said.
Laws have since been put in place to correct this period of aggressive collection. In 1989, the National Museum of American Indian Act stipulated that human remains in the collection of the National Museum of History must be repatriated. Since then, Johnson says roughly 80% of all the Alaskan remains have been repatriated or offered for repatriation.
“I think that what we're trying to do is first redress the bad actions of the past and then try and move forward to a place where we're being very supportive of the intentions of the communities,” Johnson said.
According to the Smithsonian, the museum still has 76 catalog remains from the Bristol Bay region. Of these, 75 were collected by Hrdlicka.
Though the Smithsonian has offered repatriation to the majority of communities, the process itself comes with hurdles, and not all communities have had the capacity to follow through. Hostetter explains that the process is long. She says in Igiugig, it took several years.
“We're moving towards a really healing relationship, and the Smithsonian is working towards that with other tribes, but that term 'offer' is kind of the keyword, in my opinion, because tribes are at different capacities to be able to accept this. It's a big undertaking. It probably requires a champion,” Hostetter said.
Seven years after the repatriation, Hostetter says Igiugig has seen the effects that it can have. She says she hopes that their community can set an example for other communities in the Bristol Bay region.
