The University of California (Berkeley) has ordered the return of new displays to native American tribes under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). That is hardly news except that the items were not human remains or relics, but corn, corn cobs, peas, beans, and other seeds. The university has decided that even such scientific samples are prohibited items of “cultural patronage.”
The Act requires the return of human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony. “Cultural patrimony” is defined as “an object having ongoing historical, traditional, or cultural importance central to the Native American group or culture itself.”
However, according to a federal notice, these were old corn, corn cobs and seeds, beans, and other items used for research and display by the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology.
They will now be returned to the Pueblo of Isleta, New Mexico, a Native American tribe.
Old corn cobs linked to a Native American tribe are being removed from an anthropology museum at UC Berkeley in accordance wit
