Donna Augustine was in tears as she read the letter from Harvard University that winter morning in 2013. Looking around the room inside an elementary school on Indian Island, Maine, she saw other elders and leaders from the four Wabanaki tribes were also devastated as they read that the university was denying their request to repatriate ancestral remains to their tribes.
The Wabanaki tribal nations — an alliance of the Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Maliseet and Mi’kmaq — wanted to rebury the ancestral remains. But Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology said, as it had in past years, that the tribes didn’t have enough evidence to show that they could be tied, through culture or lineage, to the ancestors whose remains the museum held.
The denial felt like a rejection of Wabanaki identity for Augustine, a Mi’kmaq grandmother, who had spent years urging Harvard to release Native American remains.
“Every one of us in that room was crying,” she recalled. “We jumped through every hoop.”
The group representing the only four tribal nations in present-day Maine had furnished a deeply researched report documenting their histories in the region, even sharing closely held stories passed down within their tribes from one generation to the next that told of their ancient ties to Maine’s lakes, islands and forests.
Now they could see it hadn’t been enough for Harvard, which especially prized the remains of 43 ancestors buried for thousands of years near Maine’s Blue Hill Bay.
Complicating matters for the tribes, another museum, the similarly named but smaller Robert S. Peabody Institute of Archaeology, housed on the campus of the Phillips Academy, a Massachusetts preparatory school, held items from the same ancient burial site.
Instead of sending a letter as Harvard did, the Phillips Academy museum director, Ryan Wheeler, had asked to meet with the tribes. Seated at the table that morning, he was initially uncertain what he would do. He would later say that it became evident during the meeting that the tribes exhibited a strong connection to the ancestors they sought to claim, both from the report they had provided and their reaction to Harvard’s decision.
He recalled leaving the meeting certain he would repatriate. “There was really no question about it,” he later said.
What the Wabanaki committee and Wheeler didn’t know, however, was just how hard Harvard would push back. In the two years that followed, the director of the Harvard museum went to surprising lengths to pressure Wheeler to reverse his decision.