To the Elem Indians, the feathered headdresses and ceremonial sackcloth dresses in the possession of state parks officials are tortured souls, imprisoned for years on a Sacramento storage shelf.
So it has been painful for the small Northern California tribe to finally reclaim the sacred items, created by their ancestors decades ago, only to discover that they may have been doused with poison.
The Elem recently invoked a 12-year-old federal law to persuade the California Department of Parks and Recreation to return the items to their reservation. But they soon learned that the artifacts--like thousands of other Indian relics stored around the country--may be loaded with toxic pesticides and preservatives applied by early curators.
"We don't know what we're going to do," said an Elem tribal leader, Robert Geary, who expects the items to be returned in the next few weeks. "We want to wear them in our dances, but they could have stuff that can get under your skin and really do some damage....When our dance regalia are worn out, our tradition is to send them back into the water. If they're toxic, how are we even going to get rid of them?"
In recent years, more and more tribes have used the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to reclaim important religious objects that have found their way into public art collections--sometimes after being stolen or swindled away by frontier-era whites.
In the hope of strengthening native cultures, the act intended that the items be reintroduced into modern Indian religious rituals. Instead, some tribes are confronting unforeseen health and religious issues because of substances used by generations of collectors who never imagined that the Indians would get the items back.
In 1998, the Onondaga Nation of New York learned that 57 medicine masks returned by the National Museum of the American Indian had been contaminated with arsenic. In 1999, Arizona's Hopi people discovered that a number of repatriated kachina dolls had been contaminated with pesticides. The discovery was made after tribe members placed the dolls in structures traditionally used to store grains and vegetables.
In California's Humboldt County, the Hoopa tribe is frustrated that it has had to keep 17 pieces of mercury-laced dance regalia locked away after they were reclaimed from Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.
