Researchers, Tribes Clash Over Native Bones

WashPo: Tribes retrieving ancestral remains

 

For decades, fights over the provenance and treatment of ­human bones have played out across the nation. Yet new federal protections could mean that the vast majority of the remains of an estimated 160,000 Native Americans held by universities, museums and federal government agencies may soon be transferred to tribes.

 

MSNBC Photos: History through the lens of today: Native Americans

 

Photojournalist Andrew Lichtenstein is documenting sites important to America's past, with the idea that what he finds there reflects on what's important to people in the present.

 

AP: Researchers, Tribes Clash Over Native Bones

 

A recently finalized federal rule about Native American human remains held by universities, museums and federal agencies is creating friction between researchers and tribes. The rule addresses what should happen to remains that cannot be positively traced to the ancestors of modern-day tribes. Such culturally unidentifiable remains have long sat in storehouses. But museums and agencies must now notify tribes whose current or ancestral lands harbored the remains and give them a chance to claim them.

 

ICT: Two American Indian Academics Examine the Media Slant as the Diabetes Crisis Looms

 

There was no word for diabetes in traditional Native languages when the Europeans arrived on this continent. In 1933, a physician for the Indian Health Service (IHS) reported just one case in the entire state of Arizona. And yet today, type 2 diabetes is devastating American Indians. The disease can lead to blindness, amputation, nerve and kidney disease, heart disease and stroke. The U.S. Health and Human Services says American Indian/Alaska Native adults are more than twice as likely as their white counterparts to get diabetes, and twice as likely to die from it. Sixteen percent of adults served by the IHS have diabetes, with rates varying from 5.5 percent among Alaska Native adults to 33.5 percent among American Indian adults in southern Arizona. Why hasn’t the mainstream media paid attention?

 

CNN: Australian panel to recommend changing constitution to recognize Aborigines

 

A panel of Australian citizens is expected to set the tone Thursday for a planned constitutional referendum to better recognize the indigenous population that inhabited the vast continent long before Europeans settled there. The diverse group includes Aboriginal leaders, business executives, legal experts and members of the main political parties. It spent the past year crisscrossing Australia to gather opinions in order to provide recommendations to the government.

 

Reuters: Met Museum spotlights American Indian art

 

An exhibit of American Indian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art throws the connection between art and collector into unusually sharp relief. The show features key pieces from The Coe Collection of American Indian Art, the life's work of a Ralph T. Coe, a collector and museum director who played a central role in reviving interest in American Indian art.