The University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign is the latest to begin a process of repatriating a collection of cultural artifacts back to the Wabanaki tribes.
The university said it has 115 items, which include spearheads, knives and other tools, as well as a birch bark basket.
According to a federal notice filed under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, the items were removed from several burial sites in central and coastal Maine. They were donated to the university’s natural history museum in the 1920s.
Other universities and museums in Maine, Massachusetts and Rhode Island have also started repatriating cultural items back to the Wabanaki tribes over the last year or so. Last spring, the University of Maine identified a collection of hundreds of Wabanaki artifacts and began returning them to the tribes.
This story appears through a media partnership with Maine Public.