Beyond the Burial Tree

For more than a century, the dead of the Pawnee lay in museum drawers and federal collections, catalogued as specimens and kept far from the Loup River valley in Nebraska where their families had buried them. Beyond the Burial Tree is the account of how they were taken, who took them, and the long fight to bring them home.

The book traces the removal of Native American ancestors from their graves on the prairie to the shelves of museums and to the Army Medical Museum, where skulls and skeletons were measured and stored in the name of science. It follows the Pawnee Nation and the families who pressed for the return of their dead, the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 that finally gave them a legal claim, the children who died far from home at government boarding schools, and the slow, uneven returns that followed.

This is history written close to the ground. It moves between the survey lines of conquest and the open grave, between the collectors who catalogued the dead and the descendants who carried them back to the valley of the wolf. It asks a plain question with no easy answer: what does a nation owe the people whose ancestors it dug up, and why does the work of return remain unfinished today.

A clear account of grave robbing, museums, federal law, and memory on the American plains, Beyond the Burial Tree belongs beside the major works on Native American history and the argument over what was taken and what must be given back.