Cree woman tracks down her great-great grandfather’s remains — in a U.S. museum warehouse – MASHAHER

Eden Fineday never anticipated that an email would lead her to finding her ancestor’s remains in a U.S. museum warehouse.

Fineday, publisher of the IndigiNews website, was spending Christmas Eve in 2023 with her family at Sweetgrass First Nation in Saskatchewan when she received a message from Washington Post data reporter Andrew Ba Tran.

He had sent her a link to the newspaper’s searchable database of human remains held by the Smithsonian Institution.

She typed in the name of her great-great grandfather, ka-mîtosis, or “Little Poplar” — and to her surprise, found out the Smithsonian has his skull in storage.

“I feel like I dissociated a little bit,” Fineday, a musician and journalist who lives in Westminster, B.C., told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.

“It was a shock. It was like this physical reaction.”

It would lead her on a journey to a warehouse in Maryland to perform a ceremony to honour her ancestor’s remains — something she says was a profound experience, and long overdue.

The Smithsonian’s collection of human remains

The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History has more than 30,700 human remains in storage, according to the Washington Post, which has reported extensively on the collection. 

Like many museums, it acquired bodies from grave sites, morgues, battlefields and hospitals around the world during the 19th and 20th centuries — mostly Indigenous peoples, and mostly taken without the consent, or even the knowledge, of their communities and loved ones. 

These remains were either donated or sold to the museum by doctors, academics, hobbyist archaeologists and for-profit grave-robbers. 

In 2023, the Smithsonian apologized for its collection and launched a task force to repatriate the remains. Anyone with personal or legal right to those remains can file a formal request to the museum for repatriation.

“But the thing is, many people are likely unaware of the existence of these remains in the first place,” Tran of the Washington Post told CBC.

So he spent months working with colleagues Claire Healy and Nicole Dungca to scan tens of thousands of handwritten records from the museum and transform them into a publicly available, searchable database. 

He says he reached out to Eden because she reports on Indigenous communities and he wanted to spread the word. But he never expected her to have a personal connection to the collection.

“I was shocked,” he said. “It was fortuitous, and I’m just so grateful.” 

A ‘responsibility’ to honour her ancestor

After finding her ancestor’s name in the database, Fineday visited a Smithsonian warehouse in Maryland to see the remains. 

But first, she called her dad.

“I felt like I needed permission. I didn’t want to do anything that wasn’t my place to do just because I could. I wasn’t sure what the protocol was,” she said.

“I told him, ‘I don’t know if I have the right.’ And he said, ‘Not only do you have the right, but you have the responsibility to do that if you have the opportunity.'”

In March, she took a bus from the Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., to a storage facility in Maryland. There, she was left alone to perform a ceremony over Little Poplar’s remains, which were carefully covered with a white cloth.

She proceeded to pray, lay down tobacco, and sing a ceremonial song that her dad gave her.

“It felt surreal to be in a room with that skull, and just me alone, able to sing that song and do smudge and just give thanks,” she said.

“It was an incredible feeling, but it was also a very intense feeling. Like, I was just destroyed afterwards. I was so tired I could barely utter a word.”

She arranged the visit with the Smithsonian’s repatriation program manager Dorothy Lippert, a Choctaw Nation archeologist, and the first woman and first Native American to hold the position.

Fineday says meeting a fellow Indigenous woman who could relate to her journey instantly made her feel more comfortable.

“I very much enjoyed meeting and working with Eden and was so glad I could support her important work of visiting her ancestor,” Lippert told CBC in an email.

‘All forms of devilry’

In an article for IndigiNews and an opinion piece for the Washington Post, Fineday told the story of how her ancestor’s remains came to be in the museum’s possession.

Ka-mîtosis, she wrote, was a Plains Cree warrior who was involved in the North-West Rebellion against colonial rule and the Canadian government, led by Métis leader Louis Riel.

In 1885, ka-mîtosis was implicated in a conflict that left nine settlers dead at Frog Lake, Sask., and fled to Montana with a $2,000 bounty on his head.

According to Smithsonian documents, he was killed a year later near Fort Assiniboine in Montana, possibly by someone seeking the bounty.

According to Smithsonian documents, his remains were dug up by army surgeon Charles Woodruff and “donated” to the Smithsonian Institution in 1894.

“I send you by express for the Smithsonian an Indian skull and I think you have none like it,” Woodruff wrote to the Smithsonian. 

He describes Little Poplar as “a Cree sub-chief from Canada” who “took advantage of the Riel rebellion to attack settlers, robbing, stealing, violating women, torturing victims and doing all forms of deviltry.”

Writing in Indiginews, Fineday says the “egregious wording” left her “laughing out loud” — a reaction she described as a form of “dissociation and deflection” from the trauma. 

“Coming from the pen of a man who had just dug up my great-great-grandfather’s grave, this seems almost like a compliment,” Fineday wrote.

Repatriation process underway

Fineday says the Chippewa Cree community on Rocky Boy’s Reservation in Montana has been in touch with the Smithsonian about repatriating Little Poplar’s remains.

“The repatriation office is awaiting the decisions of the culturally affiliated tribe and descendants with regard to the logistics of the return and I wholeheartedly look forward to this repatriation,” Lippert said. 

CBC was unable to reach a representative of the Rocky Boy’s Reservation for comment, but Fineday says she hopes Little Poplar’s remains can be returned to his original burial site there. 

“I think he should go back there and just be treated with respect and put in a place where he can rest,” she said.