This article is published in partnership with Sacred Writes: Public Scholarship on Religion, which provides support, resources, and networks for scholars of religion committed to translating the significance of their research to a broader audience. Sacred Writes is funded by the Henry Luce Foundation and hosted by Northeastern University.
The back door of the Peabody Museum. Photo provided by the author.
In fall 2020, I first encountered the fence that surrounds historic Harvard Yard.1 I felt small in the shadow of the brick pillars, Latin logos, and black wrought iron. It was the middle of the pandemic and the 25 gates into the campus were locked and guarded. I chuckled, as the granddaughter of Mexican farmworkers and a newly admitted graduate student to Harvard Divinity School, the irony was not lost on me—it was my first time on an Ivy League campus but I was not allowed to enter. Even as I laughed, my stomach churned. I knew these gates would unlock and that my student ID and eventual degree would continue to open doors for me. To be honest, I was partially relieved that the Zoom screen was the primary portal for my first year. I have always been awkward in the presence of prestige and I knew I would need to learn how to cross thresholds into spaces that were not designed for me or my community. This is something I am still learning, a reality I wrestle with daily, and ever since my first days in Cambridge, Massachusetts I have remained particularly attentive to black iron gates.
I decided to attend graduate school because I knew that my ancestors—both European and Indigenous—had ways of living, seeing, thinking, and relating before colonization, but I didn’t know anything about what those were. I also saw Colorado Chicanx communities practicing art, ceremony, and resistance that drew on traditions both Catholic and Indigenous. I had been introduced to and compelled by decolonial theories in college but I had not yet learned about pre-colonial worlds.2 I was specifically intrigued by the worlds of my Mexican ancestors and I sensed that the ancient world could guide my inquiries into religion and philosophy. Though I felt deep suspicion about both academia and museums, these seemed like access points to cultural heritage and historical knowledge, especially for those of us with ruptured traditions due to migration and colonialism. This is what I had come to explore at Harvard Divinity School with my advisors Professors Davíd Carrasco and Mayra Rivera, and what ultimately encouraged me to walk through many gates.
During the pandemic, while taking online courses as a graduate student, I worked for a podcast production company as a producer and story editor. I worked alongside Black and Indigenous archaeologists to produce a special season of the Sapiens podcast called “Our Past is the Future.”3 I interviewed dozens of scholars and community leaders about their resistance to a long history of extraction and racism and their brilliant reimagining and reclaiming of ancestral knowledge, materials, and stories. This was my alternative education, a decolonial tour de force into archaeology and museums, a de facto theories and methods course that confronted colonialism while paving a new path forward. For the final episode of the season, I began to research the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), and the horrors of human remains held by museums around the world.4 But now, at Harvard, “around the world” was around the block, and down the hall from my classroom.
I learned that Harvard’s Peabody Museum contains more than 1.2 million “cultural items” from around the globe, and beyond this museum, as an institution Harvard holds over 30 million “artifacts” across campus. As for ancestors, often called human remains, there are 22,000 total individuals with 6,100 of those being from North American Native American communities and therefore subject to NAGPRA, fifteen from likely enslaved individuals of African descent, and 10,000 from outside the United States.5 Not knowing exactly how to go beyond statistics and dig into Harvard’s ugly history of anthropology, archeology, and corresponding museum collections, I signed up for my first archaeology course. Emboldened by the Black and Indigenous scholars whose interviews were playing on repeat in my headphones, I felt called to visit the museum collections for myself.6
The threshold to the basement of the Peabody Museum. Photo provided by the author.
The gate to enter the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology (PMAE) is one that thousands of museumgoers pass by without noticing. For the observant few though, it signals an off-limits space with a less-than-interesting set of concrete stairs beyond the iron rods.7 I walked through this gate during research for my first official archaeology course. Although I was assigned the task of researching one object from Mesoamerica, I found myself pulling a thread that led me to an entire collection with a tangled history yet to be rectified.
The thread I followed was based on a scent that called to me—copal. Copalli (the name for this material in Nahuatl) is an aromatic tree resin used as an incense for thousands of years across Mexico and Central America.8 I never would have imagined this ephemeral, smokey substance could become museum property, but the museum’s Online Database revealed that the Peabody held over one hundred fragments of this sacred material in storage. The copal was a small subsection of the larger collection of over 3,000 materials which includes human remains, textiles, gold, greenstone, and other textiles from the pre-Columbian Maya city of Chichén Itzá. This is a controversial collection, yet a typical case of early 20th century extraction—these materials had been moved from Maya sacred sites, through illegal export, to collectors and museums in the U.S.9 I came face-to-face with the traditional model of archaeology that newer generations of archaeologists and museum professionals are working to disrupt and decolonize.
View of the Sacred Cenote at Chichen Itza (Wikimedia Commons).
The collection, listed under the name of archaeologist Edward H. Thompson, was the result of many years of experimental excavations from the Maya Sacred Cenote (chamber or cave) of Chichén Itzá.10 The collection is known for being illegally exported in the first decades of the 20th century from Mexico by then-U.S. Consul Thompson in partnership with the Peabody Museum director Alfred Tozzer and financial sponsors. It has been subject to various court cases in the last century, none of which resolved the original infraction, or took Maya communities and cosmologies seriously, or confronted ongoing colonial violence.11 In the archives I have read Thompson’s diaries and field notes where I found letters from mid-20th century museum administration admitting their hesitancy to return anything to Mexico, for fear of setting precedent or admitting fault. Instead of being returned, these materials are now contained in large metal cabinets, which open to reveal stacks of wooden trays, trays filled with plastic bags, and bags filled with copal. They are far from home, from the rain and land, their human and other-than human relatives. As I descended into the basement I wondered if copal would ever have a chance to ascend.
Copal fragments including rubber balls, frog, and anthropomorphic effigies – credit: Peabody Museum Expedition, E. H. Thompson, Director, 1904-1907. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 07-7-20/C4579, 07-7-20/C4594, 07-7-20/C4602, 07-7-20/C4626, 07-7-20/C4654
I haven’t been the same since I emerged from the storage. Despite my ongoing disorientation I have returned to visit the collection as often as possible. I cannot think of copal as simply a botanical substance or historical artifact, but rather, I experience copal as a powerful ritual entity and an ancestral presence that is part of a web of relations.12 This makes the current arrangement a carceral one which cannot allow for the fullness of Indigenous life, knowledge, or relationality. Cutting off materials and ancestors from one another and from their descendants is a form of ontological violence, subjecting these materials to hierarchies imposed onto them through colonial religion, philosophies, and practices. This is not merely an intellectual concern, this carceral situation means that many ceremonies, journeys, and prayers are interrupted, many sacred sites and souls are disturbed. Western institutions are often trapped by their own objectifying ontologies, so decolonization requires that we find “undisciplined” practices, in the words of Anthropology scholar Delande Justinvil, that usher in liberation.13
I am still fairly awkward in the museum, but in the basement I also realized that it is necessary and important to feel uncomfortable, and to face that which has been naturalized and neutralized as science and progress. I have been learning the practice of resistance under the guidance of people like Meredith Vasta (Turtle Mountain Chippewa) and Stephanie Mach (Navajo). As Native museum professionals they model creative and radical forms of care within these carceral conditions. I have seen how they wrestle, work for change, and regularly educate folks like me. There are no easy answers here, and yet, because of wise Black and Indigenous archeologists, Native students and colleagues, and museum professionals and professors who have lent me their time and insight, I stay in this complicated space. I continue to think with copal resin both in and beyond museum storage. I breathe in the basement and burn incense outside the buildings. I call on ancestors and guides to help me remember that copal was alive before the museum and copal can survive beyond the museum too.
View of Chichén Itzá and the Sacred Cenote from the North of the site by Tatiana Proskouriakoff. CREDIT: Gift of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1950. © President and Fellows of Harvard College, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 50-63-20/18490
- I acknowledge that I live and work on the traditional and ancestral lands of the Massachusett and Wampanoag peoples. I also acknowledge that Harvard was built on these Indigenous lands through the labor of enslaved African and Native peoples. Find out more here: https://legacyofslavery.harvard.edu/
- Thanks to professors and philosophers Alejandro Vallega, who first introduced me to decolonial theory during my B.A. at the University of Oregon, and Mayra Rivera, one of my MDiv and PhD advisorS at Harvard University. Decolonial theory can broadly be defined as a field of critical theory that aims to articulate the ways in which colonialism formed the modern world in terms of power, knowledge production, and day-to-day interactions in the post-colonial world. Coloniality, as theorized by Anibal Quijano, maps the ongoing reach of eurocentrism and therefore, decolonial theory interrogates modern assumptions while pursuing alternative, anticolonial approaches to power, epistemology, ontology, temporality etc.. Decolonial theory is distinct from, but not incommensurate with, postcolonial theory, Indigenous and Native American studies, subaltern and Third World Liberation studies (Also see: Maria Lugones, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Walter Mignolo, Franz Fanon, Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang, Enrique Dussel, Linda Tuhiawi Smith, Sylvia Cusicanqui Rivera, Ramón Grosfoguel, Rita Segato, among others).
- Along with the work of Ora Marek-Martinez (Diné/Nez Perce), I also recommend Dr. Ayana Fellewan and Dr. Justin Dunnavant who lead new cohorts of Black anthropologists into the depths of the archives, art, and the Atlantic ocean and Dr. Sven Haakanson (Alutiiq) whose stories of ethnohistory honor Native Alaskan protocols and pursue models for curating museum exhibits alongside tribal communities.
- While this is not new information for museum professionals or many tribes, the broader public is becoming more aware of these realities as local and national news cover the topic. For example a recent, comprehensive report was published by Propublica: https://www.propublica.org/article/repatriation-nagpra-museums-human-remains
- Steering Committee on Human Remains in University Museum Collections, Office of the Provost, Harvard University, https://provost.harvard.edu/steering-committee-human-remains-university-museum-collections.
- While many Indigenous communities and individuals are unable to engage in these spaces physically (for spiritual or practical reasons), I felt that I had permission to enter these spaces humbly, respectfully, and with a desire to pursue possibilities for change.
- Access, however, is available to researchers inside and outside of Harvard, as the mission of the Peabody is founded on education and research and they have worked to expand access. Yet, not all collections should be available to all people – many Native Peoples have clear protocols regarding their sacred materials which museums are often unaware of or unwilling to honor. This is one area in which Indigenous communities are pushing museums for more ethical stewardship and more control over their belongings.
- ttps://revista.drclas.harvard.edu/sacred-smoke-of-copal/; also known as Pom in many Maya languages.
- This was illegally exported as Mexico had already passed a law protecting cultural patrimony when these materials were extracted and smuggled into the U.S.
- Spencer Burke, “Envoy: From Deep to Dark,” The Harvard Advocate, 2011, https://www.theharvardadvocate.com/content/envoy-from-deep-to-dark
- Burke, https://www.theharvardadvocate.com/content/envoy-from-deep-to-dark
- While there are no universal Indigenous perspectives or beliefs, many Indigenous ontologies are inclusive of more-than-human entities including “inanimate” materials. For more on this subject you can find my MDiv thesis here: https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37376643
- Delande Justinvil, “Embracing the Poetry of Being Human, Sapiens, January 24, 2023, https://www.sapiens.org/biology/embracing-the-poetry-of-being-human/
