Woodland Indians Forum

Full Article and photos at:  https://aptnnews.ca/2019/03/13/christia … HXW68F8kkU

Christian missionary used human skull as fruit bowl, dressed up skeletons: tribal officer

Martha Troian
APTN News
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is calling on Indigenous communities in the United States to help them with a monumental task: Identifying and repatriating thousands of human remains and artifacts collected over a 60-year period.

It’s part of a four-year investigation into the recovery of 42,000 artifacts found in Don Miller’s Indiana farmhouse back in 2013 – one of the largest cases involving cultural artifacts the FBI has ever handled.

“The guy was not a professional archaeologist in any way,† said Pete Coffey, a compliance officer at the Tribal Historic Preservation Office in New Town, North Dakota.

“He had a lot of these bones in boxes with marker written on the side of it.â€

Coffey is just one tribal member the FBI is working with.

Of those 42,000 artifacts, items range from different time periods and from different cultural traditions. There were also several thousand individual remains, representing more than 500 individuals, including full skeletons.

A majority of these human remains were of Native American ancestry, police say.

Miller was a Christian missionary who crossed the line between collecting artifacts and illegal activity, said Tim Carpenter, a special agent with the FBI’s Art Crime Team, who has been leading the investigation since 2014.

The FBI believes the human remains and artifacts were dug up from tribal burial grounds.