Aanikoobijigan [ancestor / great-grandparent / great-grandchild]

The 1990 passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act required U.S. institutions to complete a full inventory of their Indigenous “skeletal collections'' to receive federal funding, and compelled them to reunite ancestors with the nearest possible descendants by working with federally recognized tribes. Since then, thousands of ancestors have been repatriated, but countless more are still waiting in boxes in sterile archives in museums across the country, with even more scattered throughout institutions around the world. Aanikoobijigan [ancestor / great-grandparent / great-grandchild] documents the struggle to return Indigenous ancestral remains while taking a critical look at the reasoning that justified unearthing and collecting them in the first place.

Aanikoobijigan centers around the Michigan Anishinaabek Cultural Preservation & Repatriation Alliance (MACPRA). MACPRA is composed of repatriation specialists who each represent one of Michigan’s tribes—the members range in age from 26-70+ and have all been led to this calling for different reasons; each strives to carve out a space for Indigenous worldviews in America’s intellectual halls of power by demanding respect for their ancestors and petitioning for their return. They surmount immense bureaucratic injustice through protracted legal battles peppered with brief, intensely rewarding moments in which justice is achieved, and ancestors who have been in cold storage for generations are finally returned home. The organization’s ongoing struggle illuminates the ideological underpinnings of a longstanding conflict between institutions of science and Indigenous people.