The glorious thing about being a critic and delivering big picture commentary is that you can do it with the blissful ignorance of not having any context whatsoever.

From Indianz and the NYTs:

In the United States, for example, the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act required every museum getting public funds to survey its collections; identify Indian remains and funerary, sacred and other objects; and consult with Indian tribes and ”repatriate” the artifacts if requested. Such objects may have been legitimately purchased a century ago from the tribes or have no issue clouding their provenance, but claims of ordinary property give way before claims of cultural property. The grievous sins of the past are now being repaid with a vengeance. And the risks of repatriation and the requirements of tribal consultation have led to promotional, uninformative and self-indulgent themes in exhibitions about American Indians.

The idea of cultural property also led to the Army Corps of Engineers’ bulldozing an archaeological site in Washington State in 1998 that had yielded a 9,200-year-old skeleton, known as Kennewick Man, the oldest ever found in North America. Without any evidence local Indian tribes claimed the skeleton was their cultural property — the bones of an ancestor — and they successfully prevented a complete scientific examination. The bulldozing was apparently a new form of protection, philistinism triumphing in the name of enlightened ideas.”