Word: smithsonian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Thanks to a $650,000 federal grant, researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics are developing new affordable telescopes they hope will improve high school science education nationwide...
Arriving at work one day, a Wasp lawyer for Washington's Smithsonian Institution finds a carton on her desk. She is stunned. Inside the box are some clumps of dirt and a note proposing that the contents -- the remains of her grandparents, freshly dug up from a New England cemetery -- be put on display by the museum. The sender is a part-Navajo conservator at the institution, furious that such a fate has befallen the bones of his ancestors...
Last week the Smithsonian signed a landmark agreement with leaders of two national Indian organizations that both sides hope will help defuse the issue. The institution, which has 18,500 human remains and thousands of other burial artifacts, agreed to inventory its collection. Remains that can be clearly identified as belonging to an individual or a surviving tribe as well as all burial artifacts will be offered to the Native Americans for reburial. In return the Indians dropped their demand that the Smithsonian surrender all its remains, many of whose origins are unknown...
...most of the unearthed Indian bones lie moldering and unexamined in museum basements; and 2) little if any data gathered from their study are shared with the descendants. According to Suzan Shown Harjo, executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, the only bit of information the Smithsonian ever imparted to her group was that their ancestors ate corn. "We could have told them that anyway," says Harjo, citing the accuracy of Indian oral tradition...
Nevertheless, common sense argues for wider acceptance of the Smithsonian's accord, even at the risk of some loss to scholarship. As Harjo notes, the agreement applies "modern standards of ethics to yesterday's abuses." And it may help forestall the future desecration of lands that others hold sacred in memory...