Gilcrease Museum Efforts Return Of Human Remains, Artifacts To Native American Tribes

The Gilcrease Museum is giving a progress report on the effort to return human remains to their descendants.

The Gilcrease collection still has some skeletal artifacts they want to return to Native American tribes.

It's the first time the museum has spoken at length, publicly about the human remains in the collection, property of the City of Tulsa, and now required to be identified if possible and reconnected with the tribal lands where they were found.

"You can't own and collect human remains, you can't own humans, so there's no reason we should have these people, who were violently removed from their resting place, in the museum," said Anthropology Collections Steward Laura Bryant.

Gilcrease Museum is closed while it's being rebuilt and the collection is in storage at the Helmerich Research Center next door.

That includes human remains the museum is required to turn over to tribal nations.

"We're actively consulting now with over 30 tribes, working to bring these home," Bryant said.

Laura Bryant is the Steward of Anthropology Collections at Gilcrease. She's in charge of cataloging the human remains and burial items.

"In some cases, we have a more complete human and in some cases, there are smaller elements," Bryant said.

The museum has an extensive online showcase for most of the collection, but none of the remains were or will be on display.

Bryant said Gilcrease is still working to catalog and associate remains with people who historically lived in the area.

Meanwhile, the journalism website ProPublica, using government files, concluded Gilcrease had more than 600 items identified as human and has now repatriated just over half of them.

Bryant doesn't dispute those numbers and says most of the remains came from Arkansas and Illinois.

"A lot of what we have, are from looters, who were going out to known sites to collect what they could to make some money," Bryant said.

Bryant said Gilcrease can meet a 5-year deadline to finish the work.

She said the repatriations happen out of public view, in consultation with the tribes that receive the remains.

To view ProPublica's database on the Gilcrease Museum, CLICK HERE.