Feature: There's no place like home
24 July 2007. By Penny Bailey.
"Our stories don't get told as much as they should," says Vince Collison, one of the First Nations Peoples of Haida Gwaii, the dagger-shaped archipelago off the coast of British Columbia, Canada. "But you need to hear them because what happened wasn't acceptable, the situation now isn't acceptable, and all your ancestors were implicated."
Vince Collison was speaking to delegates at an international conference, held at the Museum of London in March 2007, to debate the value of human remains to museums, researchers, indigenous communities and the general public.
By 'what happened', he is referring to the foreign collectors and anthropologists, who in the 19th century took human bones from native graves in Haida Gwaii, claiming they were saving the physical history of another race for posterity and science.
Those bones are now stored in metal drawers in museums across the globe, where, according to Haida beliefs, their souls are restless. "We have a very close attachment to the land of Haida Gwaii. The water, animals, birds - those are our identity, our business card. We believe the souls of the dead don't rest in peace if their bones are not left in their homeland," says Collison.
Bones database
With the help of a £438 000 grant from the Wellcome Trust, the Museum of London is creating a database, cataloguing information about its huge collection of skeletal remains, including the remains of nearly 5000 Londoners who died during the Roman and Saxon periods, and 600 victims of the 14th-century Black Death. In total, the bones of over 10 000 individuals will be recorded on the database, forming an invaluable source of information for researchers studying disease trends and lifestyle changes throughout the last two millennia.
For the past ten years, the Haida Repatriation Committee has been working to bring their ancestors back home for burial. In this, they have been supported by a global movement towards recognition of the cultural property rights of indigenous peoples. The decade 1995-2004 was proclaimed by the UN as the International Decade of the World's Indigenous People. And in June 2006 the UN Human Rights Council adopted a Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which sets benchmarks for governments to facilitate the repatriation of human remains and other cultural items to tribal communities.
In the USA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 provides a process for museums and federal agencies to return Native American human remains to federally recognised tribes. And similarly in the UK, since 1990, a number of institutions have agreed to return remains to particular indigenous groups. One of these institutions was the Wellcome Trust, which transferred three Australian Aboriginal skulls in its museum collection to Aboriginal representatives in a poignant ceremony in June 2006.
However, the move to repatriate has been contested by some researchers for whom these remains are an unparalleled source of anthropological, historical and medical information.
In 2002, scientists won a landmark legal battle to stop the US Federal Government from turning over the remains of a 9600-year-old man, discovered in Kennewick, Washington, to Native American groups. As the oldest complete human skeleton to be found in America, the researchers argued that 'Kennewick Man' offered an irreplaceable window on ancient migration patterns and populations. In July 2005, they were finally able to begin examining the ancient remains.
In November 2006, the British Natural History Museum tried to strike a compromise between the demands of the scientific and indigenous communities: it agreed to repatriate the remains of 17 indigenous Tasmanians to the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre for reburial - but only after a three-month period in which the Museum would carry out scientific tests on the remains.
The Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre countered that the bodies were taken without consent from graves in Tasmania by colonists during the 19th century, that the tests (which include drilling into the bones to extract DNA) are also being carried out without Tasmanian consent, and that such procedures desecrate the beliefs of the tribal community. In February 2007, the Tasmanians won a high court injunction temporarily preventing the Museum from carrying out the tests. This was lifted after the Museum agreed to limit its tests to 'non-invasive' methods, ruling out DNA extraction.
Source of knowledge
These fiercely fought cases highlight the strength - and difference - of meaning that human remains have to different groups.
Huge technological developments in bioarchaeology over the last 20 years are giving researchers unprecedented access to information stored in human remains - answering questions about human evolution, ancient migration patterns and ways of life, and the distribution and evolution of diseases.
Since 1977, analyses of stable isotopes extracted from human and animal bone have yielded extraordinarily precise information about long-deceased people. They reveal not only whether people cultivated maize, farmed diary cattle, ate meat or subsisted on marine foods such as seals, fish and shellfish, but also the exact proportion and quality of different foodstuffs eaten. Such information previously had to be inferred by archaeologists from surrounding fauna and flora.
Meanwhile, ancient DNA extracted from bone can yield a wealth of information about the health of earlier populations and the prevalence of genetic diseases, such as thalassaemia. The DNA of pathogens also leaves a signature in human tissues, making it possible to study the co-evolution of deadly microbacteria such as Mycobacterium tuberculosis with humans over thousands of years, and to reconstruct old diseases, which can shed light on epidemics today. "If we bury the first-hand evidence, we'll never have any answers," commented one researcher at the London conference.
In particular, remains from populations that were geographically isolated for thousands of years like Tasmania, and are therefore genetically different from other human populations, are invaluable both to evolutionary studies and to the understanding of disease. Scientists argue that such research is important for indigenous peoples today, as it sheds light on their specific susceptibility or immunity to certain diseases.
Such research is not confined to the remains of indigenous populations. In October 2005, scientists reconstructed the genetic code of the deadly 1918 'Spanish flu', which killed 20 to 40 million people, from tiny fragments of genetic material extracted from preserved tissue samples from American soldiers who fought in World War I, and died of the flu. The researchers found striking similarities between the 1918 virus strain, H1N1, and today's H5N1 avian flu virus, which may help them to predict and develop new treatments for a possible epidemic of the latter.
Public interest
Such research offers potential health benefits for people in communities across the globe. Knowledge in its own right - of history, anthropology and biology - is often valued at a premium, regardless of direct medical benefit. In a recent visitors' questionnaire by the Museum of London, 100 per cent of respondents thought human remains were useful for research, and 80 per cent thought it was acceptable to display them to the public. No one demanded their reburial.
Indeed, public hunger for the information inside our bodies is demonstrated by the popularity of televised autopsies and programmes such as CSI: Miami, and the fact that Body Worlds is the most-visited touring exhibition in the world.
But indigenous populations may not share the West's enthusiasm for this kind of knowledge, or indeed for visiting museums. "Going to museums isn't part of my culture. It's not stuff I seek out. I don't want to see human remains, that's not something I'm comfortable with," says Vince Collison.
Repatriation of human remains is fraught not only owing to these conflicting values, but also because of complicated legal issues. Until the enactment of the 2004 Human Tissue Act, most British museums were unable to dispose of human remains held in their permanent collections. Although this Act has introduced powers that enable certain national museums to return or dispose of human remains, many legal issues, such as questions about ownership, remain unclear.
Many museums and researchers argue that the burden of proof in claims relating to retention, use or repatriation of human remains should be on those making the claim, and there should be a presumption to retain human remains unless there is a clear genealogical link to the claimant community. Claimants counter that museums should return remains unconditionally to traditional custodians, and they regard the emphasis on genealogical rather than wider cultural connections as misplaced. Debates also arise about whether genealogical, cultural or other claims should take pre-eminence over arguments for public benefits that might be derived from research, or whether the two competing claims can be balanced, or whether a compromise could be sought that seeks to partially respect both needs.
Both sides offer potent arguments: it's not easy to make a simple choice between knowledge benefits for all humankind and the human rights and dignity of smaller groups.
Baroness Helena Kennedy, a British Museum Trustee, who gave a paper at the conference, believes: "Where human remains are very powerful they must trump even powerful arguments for public benefit. We need to respect each other, feel our way through the anger at the back of many claims, and realise other people's pain is important. The way we seek solutions, the process of negotiation and consultation, is important. That's going in the same direction as the pursuit of knowledge."
The Wellcome Trust's views on human remains
The Wellcome Trust's museum collection includes over 500 human remains from many different countries, dating from prehistoric times to the early 20th century. The Trust considers that all human remains occupy a unique status in museums and should be treated with respect and high standards of care. It also recognises particular sensitivities, for example around the remains of the recently deceased or those from communities where ongoing retention and or use of remains runs counter to cultural practices and beliefs. Requests for repatriation of remains are considered by the Trust on a case-by-case basis, taking the unique circumstances of each set of remains into account.
Penny Bailey is a writer at the Wellcome Trust.