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“For more than a century, leaders of the Rincon Band of Luiseño Indians in San Diego County, California, yearned to find their missing Dragonfly Basket. Created by an unknown artist, the three-dimensional dragonfly design danced across a large, expertly woven basket made of deergrass and Juncus, or rush grass. The basket’s dragonfly motif was even incorporated into the Rincon tribal seal. But in 1905, the piece was either lost or stolen. No one knows exactly what happened, according to Rincon Tribal Council Member Laurie Gonzalez.
In 1969, tribal members discovered that the basket was locked away inside the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. After the 1990 passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which requires museums that receive federal funds to repatriate ancestors and objects taken from Native American sites, the Rincon Band tried to retrieve it.
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There are other reasons why Indigenous curators are few in number, said Sven Haakanson Jr., (Alutiiq), curator of Native American Anthropology at the Burke Museum in Seattle and chair of the Anthropology Department at the University of Washington. “I’ve been in museum curation for 30 years, and I haven’t seen a growth in indigenous curators,” he said. Indeed, only 1% of the archivists, curators and museum technicians currently employed in the U.S. are Native American, according to 2022 numbers from Data USA.”
