The Natural History Museum (AMHN) of New York, icon of the city, cinematic inspiration for films such as Noche en el museo and the much more memorable Quina fera de nena!, institution renamed for its studies and one of the great tourist attractions in Manhattan, opened a few months ago a multimillion-dollar expansion that took years and neighborhood protests.
Despite the effort, yesterday Friday he announced that he is closing two of the main exhibition halls dedicated to Native American objects.
The federal government's new regulation, a set of policies updated by the Joe Biden administration that went into effect this month, requires museums to obtain tribal consent to display these pieces or carry out research on cultural elements that belong to them. The closure will leave a total of almost 1,000 m2 of exhibition space out of the reach of visitors.
While this affects other museums from coast to coast of the country, the impact of these stricter regulations is reflected dramatically in the response of the most important venue of all, the AMHN, on the Upper West Side, where it receives more than 4.5 million annual visitors, which makes it one of the most frequented in the world. Its anthropology department is one of the oldest and most prestigious in the United States, recognized for its pioneering work.
"The rooms we will be closing contain artifacts from a time when museums like ours did not respect the values, perspectives, and indeed the shared humanity of Indigenous peoples," Sean Decatur, president of the institution, wrote in the letter he addressed to the command team on Friday. "Actions that may seem sudden to some, to others may seem long overdue," he added.
The measure, advanced by The New York Times, will affect from the weekend the spaces dedicated to the forests of the east and the great plains. In addition, a series of display cases displaying Native cultural objects framed in the monumental collection will be covered to ensure compliance with the new rules.
The museum explained that they could not offer a timetable on the possible reopening once the objects removed from public view are reconsidered.
Decatur did acknowledge in statements to the Times that there will be pieces that will never be displayed at the site again as a result of the consultation process with the natives.
All these changes are due to the effort of the Biden Government to speed up the repatriation of indigenous rights in possession of museums or universities, funerary objects and other sacred pieces. The issue began in 1990 with the protection and repatriation law, but the process got stuck not infrequently, amid criticism from the natives themselves for the slowness of application and for being a law very susceptible to institutional resistance to complying with it.
The regulation that was launched in January aims to speed up returns, with a five-year deadline to prepare the returns of remains and objects in the possession of others. The initiative of the Natural History Museum offers a first example of good will. In the affected collections there are pieces from various tribes, such as the Iroquois, the Arapaho or the Cheyenne.
