Oregon Public Broadcasting

A natural history museum in Seattle has returned 11 sets of ancestral remains to the home of Chief Seattle.  The Suquamish Indian tribe hosted an emotional reburial ceremony.

The ancestral remains were reburied in cedar boxes at a Suquamish tribal cemetery very near where archaeologists dug them up and took them away more than half a century ago.

Suquamish tribal member Rob Purser helped negotiate the return of the bones from the Burke Museum – to put them at peace.  Purser says the exact age of the remains is uncertain, but they could well be ancestors of the chief after whom Seattle is named.

Rob Purser: “A lot of the elders -- especially that are alive today -- witnessed such terrible things in their childhoods. And now to see something that they thought would never happen, see it happen, is in the elders' point of view pretty amazing.”

Seattle’s Burke Museum had no objection to turning the bones back to the Suquamish tribe.  In fact, it’s returned more than 200 sets of human remains to tribes as far away as Nebraska.

In 1990, Congress passed a law requiring museums to repatriate Native American remains where possible.