Indigenous artifacts uncovered at USD

Questions arise after 320 boxes of artifacts are found in Saints Serra and Tekakwitha Hall

Jennifer Mossuto / Associate Editor / The USD Vista

Catherine Silvey / Managing Editor / The USD Vista

Mikaela Foehr / Copy Editor / The USD Vista

For 15 years a closet on the third floor of Saints Serra and Tekakwitha Hall sat full of boxes, no questions asked. For 15 years, the University of San Diego’s administration was unaware they were sitting on a collection of artifacts that could place them in violation of federal law. 

In Feb. 2020, a collection of Indigenous artifacts in Serra 308 was brought to the attention of USD administration by Jan Bernstein, owner of Bernstein and Associates NAGPRA  (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) consulting firm. The university hired Bernstein’s office to “provide NAGPRA implementation services,” such as verifying artifacts that USD was in possession of. 

According to Bernstein, outside of some anthropology department faculty, USD was unaware that this collection, named the Hubbs Collection, existed on campus, including shells, animal bones, and human remains. 

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) is a federal law passed in 1990, requiring institutions to compile inventories of collections of Native American artifacts, publish these records on the federal registrar, and consult with all tribes associated with the artifacts to ensure the repatriation of specific items. Artifacts required to be repatriated to their rightful tribes under NAGPRA are objects of cultural significance and any objects related to burial sites. These can range from human remains to objects left at burial sites as offerings, to any item that was used in the burial process. This law is significant to Indigenous communities because it gives them legal claim over pieces of their culture and ancestry that were taken from archeological sites, often under the pretense of academic research.

It was in a conversation with the chair of Anthropology, Jerome Hall Ph.D., that Bernstein determined elements of the Hubbs Collection likely fell under NAGPRA jurisdiction. It is unknown whether or not Hall knew what specifically was in the collection. Before this discovery, USD was known to be in possession of two other collections, the May Collection and the Spencer Rogers Collection, which were both being processed for NAGPRA compliance.

Eva Trujillo, cultural resource manager for NAGPRA at the Museum of Us, is familiar with the NAGPRA process and shed light on its intricacies. 

“Basically this law, anybody who receives federal funding has to participate in NAGPRA. That includes teaching universities, they are the big offenders right now,” Trujillo said. According to NAGPRA law, any institution found to be in violation of NAGPRA can potentially lose federal funding, although this provision is rarely enacted.

Once artifacts are discovered, whether through excavation or a campus search, the NAGPRA process needs to be enacted so the correct tribes and landholders can be notified to regain their cultural artifacts. This process is time-consuming and can be drawn out even more when questions of legal ownership come into play, as it did with this collection.

The collection of artifacts from Serra 308 is known as the Hubbs Collection, named after Carl L. Hubbs, the man who unearthed and collected the Indigenous artifacts. Hubbs was a professor at the University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institute who collected the artifacts during his time of employment. 

According to Bernstein, Hubbs bequeathed the collection to the Museum of Us upon his death in 1979. Later, in 2004, the collection was donated to USD’s anthropology department by the museum where it has remained in Serra 308 ever since. Through detailed legal review, it was determined that the Hubbs Collection is still under the legal control of UCSD, despite its meandering path 

“Carl Hubbs was employed by Scripps, which is part of the university (UCSD), and therefore anything he collected was under the control of that university, even though he had transferred legal ownership through a bequest to the Museum of Us (located in Balboa Park),” Bernstein said. “A determination was made that he never had the authority to do that and University of California San Diego retained legal control and therefore had NAGPRA compliance responsibility.” 

Even though the Hubbs Collection is under legal control of UCSD, all three institutions associated with the collection are working together to ensure NAGPRA compliance according to statements by Bernstein and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Noelle Norton Ph.D. Despite the collective cooperation of these institutions, there was an apparent lack of communication here at USD between involved faculty.

For 15 years, no one outside of the situation knew about the Hubbs Collection. The Hubbs Collection is still not public knowledge at the university. The anthropology department is the physical custodian of the collection, but Jerome Hall insists they were left in the dark during this repatriation process.

Hall explains that the communication has been lacking, considering there is a biological anthropologist, Dr. Jennifer Parkinson, in the anthropology department, and she was never consulted on any of this. 

“We have NAGPRA specialists within our own department,” Hall said. “Perhaps they’re (the university) just trying to keep it independent, but there are questions at least in my mind surrounding the timetable of all this and the extent of all.”

Hall noted that he had been introduced to NAGPRA consultant Jan Bernstein in February 2020 in the context of an investigation into the history department she was involved in. While he was willing to cooperate and show Bernstein the Hubbs Collection under his supervision, concerns quickly cropped up when he discovered that Associate Dean Kristin Moran had given Bernstein access to the Hubbs Collection without informing Hall.

“This raised issues about the integrity of the collection,” Hall said. “If we are responsible as custodians for the collection, we can’t just have somebody opening it up and letting someone not even associated with the university, other than on the payroll, access to it.”

After the collection was removed in February 2021, Hall also noted inconsistencies in what the contents of the collection were thought to be among the parties involved. While he reported that examinations by both the Museum of Us and the anthropology department found no human bone, Trujillo and Persephone Lewis, USD tribal liaison and professor of ethnic studies, both assert that human remains were found in the collection.

“If you have found human remains and sacred objects in the Hubbs Collection, I want to know from which component of the Hubbs Collection,” Hall said. “From the component that you took from us? Because everything we have indicates that those were looked at not only by us, but by the Museum of Us, and there was no human bone.”

Former anthropology department chair Angelo Orona corroborated the claim that the Museum of Us had checked the collection before deaccessioning, noting that items were found that fell under NAGPRA jurisdiction during the search and that they were removed before USD received the collection.

“They went through it and there was one site in which the Hubbs group found human remains,” Orona said. “Those bags, the museum kept them, they kept the human remains. And then there was another object that was considered sacred that was found up in maybe Washington, up north, and it was determined sacred. So the museum then did follow the NAGPRA ruling. And so it was now repatriated.” 

Hall noted that his own examinations of the collection only turned up rock and shell, which he believes to be from trash heaps formed when people extract meat from shells. However, Lewis stated that shells may fall under NAGPRA if they came from Kumeyaay land because “we know that they (Kumeyaay people) gave shells and faunal bones as offerings,” which would classify them as associated funerary objects.

While he is open to taking accountability if the anthropology department mishandled artifacts, Hall asserts that he can no longer verify the legitimacy of the collection starting the day it was taken from Room 308 in Saints Serra and Tekakwitha Hall.

“I am the person that is fully responsible for the collection and the buck stops with me,” Hall said. “But I can no longer make that claim because the collection is no longer with us.”

The Dean of Arts and Sciences, Noelle Notron Ph.D., claimed that all information about the material being stored was turned over to the provost office when she was first alerted that there was a collection on campus that had not been inventoried in July 2019. The extent of Dean Norton’s place in this process is to attend meetings and “show support for the process.”

On Feb. 23, 2021, a letter summarizing the current findings was mailed to tribes and landholders associated with the found artifacts explaining the discovery of this collection. This is the first step in the NAGPRA process and according to Lewis, the findings are still preliminary due to the large number of artifacts in the 320 boxes that constitute the Hubbs Collection that still need processing and identifying.

“You’ll open a box and there will be 60 bags of shells or open another box and it will be a big bag of soil,” Lewis said. “He (Hubbs) took bones, projectile points, they took everything that would be at a site.” A human tooth was also found in one of these boxes.

 A formal consultation process with associated parties has not yet begun, and although UCSD is the legal owner of the Hubbs Collection, UCSD, the Museum of Us, and USD are holding monthly meetings to discuss where they are in the repatriation process. The Hubbs Collection will remain at USD while it is being inventoried. Associated tribes and landholders are invited to every meeting, although Lewis said there was not much participation from them yet.

Moving forward through this process, Bernstein will stay on contract to make sure everything the university does is in compliance with the law according to Lewis. Lewis also acknowledged how students may react to learning about this situation.

“A lot of times it is really easy to get mad at the institutions, and we had failures and need to take responsibility for that, but we are doing our best job to make sure the tribes are centered in this process,” Lewis said. 

She went on to say that, in her opinion, there should be more awareness and education about NAGPRA law and processes and the ethics that go into research among both students and faculty. 

“If faculty don’t know, then students don’t know,” Lewis said.

Lewis wants to see USD grow from this experience and create policies that aim to make sure collections like these do not go unnoticed and unprocessed for years on end.

“We need to be able to show (the tribes) that we are doing our due diligence, and education is imperative to that,” Lewis said. “Universities love to be aspirational but when you have to do the work, it is hard. But USD is doing work to live up to those expectations.”

As forensic anthropologists work to determine what tribes the artifacts belong to, more information and questions will arise. This is a long, ongoing process.