Why Museums Should Repatriate Fossils

Tuesday, June 18, 2024

An article co-authored by Lukas Rieppel, associate professor of history at Brown University, and the CAIRNS director, published online in Nature, argues that fossils collected from Lakotan treaty lands should be returned to appropriate facilities in those lands. The focus of the article are two expeditions that traveled into Lakotan treaty lands 150 years ago. The first was the Custer Expedition into the Black Hills from July 1 to August 30, 1874.  The second was a shorter, stealthier, more extractive expedition a few months later led by Othniel Charles Marsh, a prominent palaeontologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. That expedition took two tons of fossils from the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty unceded lands and shipped them to the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. The article can be read here. Shown in the picture above, right to left, is Red Cloud and Othniel Charles Marsh.

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