Art

Formerly the Collection Of

An empty archival storage box lined with acid-free tissue sits open on a plain table in a museum collections room, flanked by white cotton handling gloves, with rows of old wooden specimen drawers lining the walls under a high window.

Formerly in the collection of Dr. Rollin H. Bunch, of Muncie, Indiana. Before that, the Edward W. Payne Collection, Springfield, Illinois. Before that, the collection of Donald O. Boudeman, of Kalamazoo. Collected originally by Charles C. Jones, of Atlanta, Georgia, from a mound near Talbotton, in Talbot County. That is the entire recorded life of a single pipe, and it reads exactly like the fine print under a lot number, because it is drawn from the same kind of institutional memory a saleroom keeps: who had it, in what order, before it arrived here. What it precedes is not a lot number. It is a Federal Register notice, filed 23 September, titled “Notice of Intended Repatriation: Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, Indianapolis, IN.” The pipe is what the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act calls an unassociated funerary object — grave goods separated, at some point in the last century and a half, from the remains they were buried beside. The notice does not say by whom, or how. Only where it has been since.

The notice states that there is “a connection” between the pipe and two nations: the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians. That is not an unusual pairing for a Georgia mound, though the two peoples do not tell the story of their relationship quite the same way. The Miccosukee’s own account holds that they were “only briefly affiliated with the Creeks” and were always a distinct nation, sharing territory in Georgia, Alabama and Florida since long before Europeans arrived. The outside ethnohistoric record more often describes a Hitchiti-speaking people who were part of the Creek Confederacy until they broke away in the years after the First Seminole War of 1817–18 and moved south into Florida. The two accounts disagree about how separate the peoples always were, which is a small, live version of the exact question a federal register has to answer: whose telling of a people’s own history counts as the record. Repatriation, the notice says, “may occur on or after October 23” — thirty days out from filing — and if a second nation submits a request in that window, the museum must determine “the most appropriate requestor” before anything moves. That determination is made, under the statute, by a preponderance of the evidence: the same standard a civil court uses to decide which of two plausible accounts to credit.

Until January 2024, the government’s own default ran the other way. Revised regulations that took effect that month struck the category of remains a museum could simply declare “culturally unidentifiable,” and required, in the words of then-Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, “deference to the Indigenous Knowledge of lineal descendants, Tribes and NHOs” rather than to whatever standard a museum’s own registrar had been applying. The change was immediate: within weeks, the Field Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, the Met, Harvard’s Peabody Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art had all draped or removed Native American cases rather than keep displaying human remains without the consultation the new rule required. The Field’s own line was plain: the cases would stay covered “until appropriate consultations can be completed.”

So the law now defers to a kind of knowledge no museum ledger was ever built to hold, and that is a genuine reversal, not a forced choice between two equally good ledgers. But a single pipe still needed a notice, a fixed filing date, and a name for a determinate outcome, arrived at within thirty days by whichever party’s evidence outweighs the other’s. The law changed which testimony a claim has to credit. It did not change whether an answer still has to come out the far end of a form, on a schedule, as one name.

Whoever is meant by “Charles C. Jones, of Atlanta, Georgia” on that provenance line, the name belongs, at the very least, to one of the most consequential relic-collectors nineteenth-century Georgia produced. A Charles Colcock Jones Jr. — Confederate lieutenant colonel and, in later life, by the New Georgia Encyclopedia’s account, “a prominent memorialist of the Lost Cause” — amassed more than 20,000 prehistoric artifacts in his lifetime and in 1873 published Antiquities of the Southern Indians, Particularly of the Georgia Tribes, still the founding scholarly account of exactly these mounds a century and a half later. I don’t know whether he is the Jones this notice means, rather than some other man of the same name and city; the record doesn’t say, and I won’t pretend it does. But if it is him, the coincidence is worth sitting with rather than resolving: a man who spent his later career making sure one lost cause was publicly mourned, on the strength of a collecting habit thorough enough that the mounds it emptied are still, under his own name, the standard reference for a people whose graves he had already opened.

Thoroughness, it turns out, outlasted every intention behind it. A relic-hunter’s habit of writing everything down produced, by accident, the only kind of record precise enough to survive four changes of hands, an 1873 monograph, three states, and a century and a half, and still be legible to a federal register in 2026. Whatever the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields decides next month, the pipe is about to do something it has not done since it was dug out of that mound: leave a collection by request of the people it was buried with, rather than by purchase, gift or inheritance among the people who were not.

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