Good afternoon, and welcome to the IUPUI Center for Translating Research and to Practice. Conversation of the month with one of our monthly scholars. My name is Steve Vega, the Associate Director of the Center for Translating Research and too Practice. It's my pleasure to welcome you all here. We're delighted to have this opportunity to, good afternoon, everyone. I'm not sure of what happened to Professor V here, but we'll just continue going. So let me share my experience here. No. Okay. So we want to welcome everyone to our November School of the month conversation series event featuring Professor Holly Cusack McVay. We are very excited for her to be here today. We're also excited for you all to be here as well. Just a few Zoom etiquette reminders, please mute your microphones to help keep the background noise to a minimum if you've not been called on to speak. We will have time at the end of the Professor Holly Cusack McVays conversation to our presentation to have a conversation. During the meantime, you can type your questions, comments into the chat. Also, this presentation is being recorded for future viewing on our YouTube page, and also it is being live stream on our Facebook page as well. After this event, you will receive a post evaluation survey. It's anonymous, and we really appreciate if you fill that out so we can continue to make our events better as we go. Also you can get continuing education credits for attending our scholar the month events by visiting IU Expand. Then you can also follow us on our social media pages to stay up to date on the latest news happening with our trip scholars and our trip community, and on campus and in Indianapolis. We post a lot of valuable information. We've go on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Then also another resource that we have available is Scholar works. So here is an example of this for Professor Holly Cusack McVay. With scholar works, you're able to access our scholars publications, journals, presentations, articles, everything. It's all here in Scholar works. So here's our example. We do this in collaboration with the IPI University Library. Specifically with Jerry O'Dell. He's one of our main contacts for the Scholar works for our trip scholars. Like I said, we have this for all of our scholars. And it's available to anyone. There's thousands of resources. It's a great resource for anyone. And then we also have an upcoming event next month. We're doing something a little different. It's going to be a year in review. We're going to be playing some fun games. It's going to be a lot of interaction. So stay tuned for more details about that. That's a work in progress here. So without further ado, I'm going to stop sharing, and Professor A Kuac McVay is going to start sharing, and we'll jump right into this. Thank you. Thank you for that introduction, No. And good afternoon, everyone. I'm going to go ahead and share screen. Okay. Is that good, Nori? Yes, that is good. All right. So I'm pleased to be here to present my ongoing research, generally speaking. This is something that I have been doing in one form or another for many decades. But of co, this case brought some rather unique opportunities as a teacher. To involve my students at I UPUI, both undergraduate and graduate students. And so what I'm going to do, the way that I've structured this for this conversation of the month, I'm going to go through the case beginning with my part on the case and sort of give you a timeline For how this came about and to sort highlight the various and significant roles that IUPUI students have played on this ongoing investigation since 2014. I would before we begin, like to acknowledge that we are on the traditional ancestral homelands of the Miami, Pottawatomie, and Shawnee people. That we honor the heritage of these native groups and to also acknowledge that this month is national Native American Heritage Month. I would also like to acknowledge that we are on the historic Native homelnds, not only of these indigenous groups, but more recently of that of a vibrant Black community that was also displaced from where we sit and learn today. So I wanted to acknowledge that and to emphasize that this land acknowledgment was recently adopted, officially adopted by IUPUI, and can be found on the Division of Diversity Equity, and Inclusion Homepage. So I'll start with the case history. Actually, the case came to light. The public became aware of this case in April of 2014. I actually started working with the FBI in a quiet capacity, conducting research and doing some undercover work in preparation for the beginning of this case. And helped build the search warrant for this particular case that we knew was going to be very complex and would be a multi year investigation. What we did not, although we knew we would be recovering foreign and domestic objects, thousands of them. We did not anticipate the recovery of more than 7,000 individual human remains. And so that was something that we had to adjust for once on site. What's really remarkable about this particular week long FBI seizure is that I worked with the FBI art crime team and convinced them that a collaborative approach that included community scholars and community members throughout the quiet planning phases would result in a more successful outcome for everyone. And so on day one of the recovery during the seizure, there were over two dozen current IUPUI students and or alumni from museum studies and Anthropology who actually assisted with seizure working side by side with federal agents. Of course, the media very quickly picked up on the story. It made not only local and national news, but by the end of the first day, I had colleagues in New Zealand reaching out to me to learn more about the case. Again, I think one of the things that's really unique about this case is the collaborative approach between law enforcement, indigenous community members and various experts in the field. Again, not only experts in the field like doctor Larry Zimmerman and Charlie Champion Shaw, but also IUPUI graduate and undergraduate students who brought to this case their own expertise. Some were trained in museum best practices. Others came to this case with an understanding of the sensitivities surrounding repatriation in indigenous communities. And as you can see, this collection, this collection seized right here in Indiana, included countries from around the world and below on the bottom of the screen, I list just a few of the foreign nations that we have worked with consulted with, and repatriated to since the beginning of the case. As I said, IUPUI students were involved with case from the very beginning. This is them working at the FBI offsite in Indianapolis and actually working the day before the case came to light and made headlines in the media. And they're preparing Archival safe boxes for the safe recovery of the cultural material. Of course, in the planning phases, there were many things that we had to take into consideration. We had to come up with a collections management plan. We knew we would be seizing and transporting thousands of objects in less than a week. And we had to have a solid plan in place for that. We actually had two lines of outgoing, where of course, only FBI agents, federal agents can handle evidence, but the IUPUI students, my IUPUI students, were there side by side with those agents, identifying pieces and tagging assigning numbers to them so that we could not only have physical control of the collection at all times, but intellectual control as well. And that included a process for registration. Once the piece was brought out, we had two registrars at all times on computers, entering the data into the system so that we could track locations and know exactly when a piece was seized, and by whom? And then it was transported. We had large sem trucks for transport. We had concerns about personal safety. We had over 100 people on the ground at any given time. So this truly is a very large operation even by FBI standards. And todate, it's still the largest known well, it is the largest recovery of cultural material by any government agency. Once we discovered the human remains, we also needed to take into account the cultural sensitivities surrounding ancestral remains. We didn't know at the time who the people were necessarily. We knew that some were Native American. And so we began that process immediately, that process of outreach. And again, Charlie Champion Shaw was instrumental in assisting the FBI with early and ongoing communication with federally recognized tribes. And then, of course, the respectful treatment of the human remains as well. So again, following museum best practices, we had large tents constructed, as you see here, and we also fought very hard to make sure that we had archival safe materials because we did not know how long we would be housing the cultural items. We had a range of challenges that forced us to go with Plan B, Plan C, Plan D. All week, things were changing very rapidly. It was a cold April. We had a lot of rain. We had flooding. We were up to our knees in mud, trying to recover and safely handle the objects that we were seizing. In some of the locations where we were recovering cultural items and human remains, there was a lot of active mold. So we quickly had to shift to Ty suits, as you see here, and respirator masks to protect the safety of our team. Active infestation, everything from domestic beetles, mice, and silverfish, swarms of silverfish. So that was something we had not entirely planned on was the amount of infestation that we would be encountering as we moved from room to room. And we were also concerned about toxins. A lot of older collections, particularly in the 1800s, were treated with heavy metal toxins like arsenic and Mercury to discourage and eliminate pest infestation. And so we had to bring in XRF equipment to make sure that the items were not contaminated, but of course, we were also wearing proper protective equipment to protect us from those toxins. Intellectual challenges were equally varied. We had to take into account in this very complex legal setting, not only local and state and federal laws, but a slew of treaties that govern removal of property from foreign nations at different time periods. So for example, Peru's laws are stronger and older than Ecuadors. And so we had to take for each one, we had to take into account the particular laws that protected the foreign material in order to determine what was in violation of international laws and treaties. So, as I said, doctor Larry Zimmerman on the far left and Charlie Champion Shaw on the far right, both of IUPUI, were instrumental in this case from the very beginning. And Charlie Champion Shaw really was instrumental in making sure that the FBI was doing meaningful consultation and being very transparent from the very beginning. And so I really credit her for giving the FBI R crime team a strong start to building true rapport and a genuine relationship with tribal nations. What came out of those early consultations, tribes were very clear. They did not want invasive techniques for testing the human remains to determine who we had recovered. They did want to know cultural affiliation when possible, but other methods for determining that, including other lines of evidence. Sadly, the human remains were terribly mixed. And that has continued to be a very difficult challenge for us and a very difficult conversation to have with tribal elders and leaders. Having to sit with the tribal elder at the three affiliated tribes and explain to her why a single human cranium represents four individuals. So when I say that they were treated horribly and mixed, I mean that they were stored in mixed settings, careless settings, but they were also mixed and manipulated in very deliberate ways. And those are difficult conversations to have with descendant communities, as you can imagine, At the end of the seizure, the week long seizure, the Pkagan Band of Potawatomi, the federally recognized tribe in the State of Indiana, elders were brought in to offer prayers and to assure the ancestors that had been recovered that they were going home. They were finally going home, that this was ending and that they would from here on out, be treated with the utmost respect until they were back in the hands of their community members in the care of their community members. In October. So that was April of 2014, and then just that following fall in October of 2014, dynamic group of Anthropology and Museum Studies, graduate students helped me move the entire collection from the Indianapolis FBI field office to an undisclosed location. So that was a long, hard and intensive day logistically, actually, emotionally and physically. And they were amazing. In part, again, I want to emphasize, because they brought to this case the theoretical understandings, of the sensitivities surrounding the repatriation of the dead and sacred items. And then on October of 2016, the FBI, we traveled to South Dakota to the Crow Creek Reservation, where we took part in a reburial ceremony for the first 12 ancestors who were identified to have been taken from a historic cemetery on the Missouri River. Incredibly powerful experience. This is one of my favorite photos on the right because everyone knows the FBI is very good at doing interviews. But in this case, the tribal elder has sort of reversed the story, and she's interviewing the federal agents. And so I really love that story because she was the editor of the local tribal newsletter, and she was the one doing the interviewing. And every bit as tough at doing the interview as any agent could or would be. So I really love that story and that particular photo. This is a quote from one of the elders, and I think it's really key that there was a lot of mistrust. Not only did the South Dakota Tribes mistrust the FBI. And if you know anything about the history of wounded knee two. In the 1970s, you know there's a very tense history between South Dakota tribes, particularly the Ogla Sew at Pine Ridge and the FBI. And so they talked a lot about the mistrust, not only of the FBI, but also of university representatives. And then reflected on how over time through consultation, we developed genuine rapport. Delegation came from South Dakota to Indianapolis, to the undisclosed location where the ancestors and other items were and are being stored. And they prayed and they sang and they assured them in their own language that they would soon be coming home. They fed them, they brought berries, they brought water from their lands. They brought berries and buffalo meat to feed their ancestors as they prayed. And during that reburial ceremony, the in October of 2016, the tribes shows what in South Dakota was called Native American Heritage Day, and in other parts of the country, still known as Columbus Day. I'm going to run through, just to give you a sense for how diverse the international repatriations have been. Our first major repatriation was at the Peruvian Embassy in Washington DC in June of 2017. This is FBI headquarters. As you can see, we had over 100 items that were being returned to the Peruvian government, including human remains of indigenous individuals. And at this time that we did the repatriation, the governments of Peru and the United States also renewed the bilateral agreement between the two nations. We have repatriated several dozen objects to Colombia, and in Bogota, they tied that repatriation to a heritage protection and preservation seminar that they were doing for law enforcement in Bogata. In February 2019 at the Idle Gord Museum of American Indians and Western Art. Again, Anthropology and Museum study students assisted with a week long repatriation, which resulted in the return of 361 artifacts to the People's Republic of China. And then in February of 2020, just before everything shut down due to the pandemic, we returned 420 artifacts looted artifacts to the Republic of Haiti. And again, this would not have happened if I had not had the skilled and dedicated teams of IUPUI students helping me rehouse over 400 artifacts and prepare them in large shipping crates for transport back to Port of Prince, Haiti. And so the deputy assistant director of the FBI, I'm proud to say, recognized at this government to government official ceremony, not only IUPUI, but as he said, my wonderful team of grad students without whom, he said, we wouldn't be here today. So I was that he specifically recognized our students as being key to the ongoing success of this case. And then just last May, another group of IUPUI students, including my community engagement Associates, Margaret Alway from Anthropology and Gave Cruise from museum studies, helped me prepare several hundred items for repatriation. Excuse me, I misspoke. Over 100 items to repatriate to Papo New Guinea. And again, you can see the size of the shipping crates. These are very heavy artifacts and very heavy shipping crates. And really, truly to pull this off each one. It takes a lot of blood sweat and tears. And we've given a lot of blood sweat and tears. And then also, in May of 2021, it was a group of IUPUI students who helped me host a large delegation of Oglala Sioux tribal members from Pine Ridge, who were coming to prepare their ancestors and to consult to do government to government consultation with the FBI here in Indianapolis at the Idle Jorg Museum of American Indians and Western art. And then the day they left for South Dakota, we pulled off the loading dock in Indianapolis with a very large Pensky truck, a 26 foot Pensky truck, loaded from front to back, top to bottom, with multiple shipping crates, where we conducted repatriations with seven tribes in two states in four days, driving east to west and from the North to the South. And as you can see, after the reburial of ancestors, we were way up on a Mesa in a very rural part of Arizona, and we blew the tire completely. And so that's the advantage of traveling with FBI agents. I got to get out and walk the land and visit with some tribal members while they managed the rental vehicles flat tire. But it was an incredible opportunity to work with Hopi also at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff the week following the reburial ancestors to the Hopi tribe. And so I argue in closing, and I want time for conversation with all of you, that this is really a replicable model, this model of community collaboration. It does take more time and a whole lot more energy to do this kind of collaborative community based work. But I think we need to keep messaging to institutions, to agencies, law enforcement agencies, that this is the right way to recover cultural heritage, and to involve community stakeholders in all stages of recovery. I also think it's a shift. I hope it's a shift in the way that we think about cultural heritage as more than just intangible or inanimate objects, not just evidence or scientific data, but that really we can begin to think about cultural heritage from an indigenous perspective. So what do my students learn as a result of their participation on this landmark case? One, they understand the concept of justice, and in the original legal definition of justice as fairness. This case highlights glaring injustice. Whose ancestors have been the target of illegal and unethical activities for century? Whose graves are robbed and continue to be robbed? U So again, contrasting, the idea that these graves are somehow fair game while at the same time, honoring and respecting European cemeteries and marking them and honoring the dead in those places. So I would argue that these injustices that we know exist in the world of the living extend quite often to the world of the dead. And these are the conversations I have with my students in a class setting. Then I would like to end with the idea that education is key. My students are learning something about how to work with community stakeholders. This is really deep learning. This is a long term relationships these are long term relationships that are built, and it really is the kind of community engagement where students are a part of solving real world problems and often describe the experience in their own student evaluations as transformative. Here's a quote from one of our undergraduate students from last year in the Department of Anthropology and history. She talks about the fact that she never really realized how privileged she was to have her history in her own hands. And so I want to end my talk by just saying that I think education is key, but that we really need to extend that education and these understandings to the general public who largely still don't understand these issues as fully as we need them to. That's all I have. Thank you. Stop sharing screen. Thank you, Holly. And this is our time to open up the conversation to the broader community. So we invite you to first of all, turn on your camera so that we can see you. Holly would love to see our faces as we begin a conversation. There's two ways that you could engage in a conversation to ask questions or to dig deeper. And that would be to put a question or comment in the chat or to go to the reactions at the bottom and raise your hand so that we could know that you're interested in saying something and we'll invite you to unmute. While you're thinking about that, I want to thank my amazing colleague Nuri Mc Lucas for helping get us all started today as M Zoom crashed, and we're back in place here. What questions or comments do you have that we would want to invite some conversation here. I'll pause a moment and see anybody has something they'd like to say. I have a question. Okay. Nuri, go ahead. I have a couple of questions, actually. So my first question is, I read in an article that he had like thousands of well, let me back up. Thank you, Professor Holly Cech McVeigh, for this presentation. It was very good. I learned a lot. My first question is, so I read that you seized over 7,000 or recovered 7,000 objects, but there were a bunch more. I was wondering what happened to those. Like Yeah, that's a great question. And it's problematic. I wish I had a nice simple answer for you. Of course, this was a law enforcement activity, and federal agencies law enforcement agencies are seizing those things which they know to be unlawfully obtained. And so there were items that were not seized for that reason. And as I said, when I talked about Peru, for example, having very old and well established cultural Heritage protection laws, some countries do not and still don't. So there's no time depth to those national laws for protection, or they simply don't exist at all. So where in the, you know, there may be things that were inappropriately obtained from a foreign nation. But in the absence of a national law, saying that those things should not have left the country, our law enforcement agencies at the federal level can't seize that property. They have no basis upon which to seize that property, legal basis. Now, that's a great question because we can use state, federal and international law to appeal to the ethical issues involved. And that's an area where I'm beginning to explore ways. For example, I'll use the example of how do we talk to France and to foreign auction houses? You know, I'm using France as an example. It's certainly not the only place. You know, the Hopi, for example, are always seeing their spirit beings, their sacred spirit beings, who are very much alive. There is alive as any of us in this meeting right now. And they're coming up for auction in Paris. And the Hopi can't use National Nag Pro law to say, it's illegal to buy and sell sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony because it's across international boundaries. But they can use the ethical argument that the law is based in to appeal to those governments and those running the auction houses. And so it's my hope that moving forward, not only with this particular collector here in Indiana, but the many, many others who are still out there with similar collections that even in the absence of a legal argument, we can appeal to them On an ethical in a way that, you know, appeals to their own sense of morality of what's right and what's wrong. What is justice? If it's equality, then we have to look at, you know, even now, there are over 116 than human beings still in US museums waiting to go home, that's a staggering number. They're not all Native American. Some represent Black communities from the United States and foreign nations. But in the absence of laws that protect those individuals, then we need to appeal to the ethical issues involved. If we want our own ancestors treated with love and respect and dignity, Mm hmm. And that should apply to all human beings everywhere regardless of time period. Mm hmm. Okay. And then I have a follow up question to that. And I see Phil Bramciz also has a question here, too. But so I know it's challenging to work backwards, but moving forward, say, a private collector dies and then their will, they're like, Oh, I want to donate my my possessions to Idle org, Newfield. Is there someone in these museums that researches, like, where did this come from? To like, stop it right there? Right. So Yeah. That's such a great question. And again, a very complex question. We can't Most museums won't touch. These questionable items. You know, a lot of private collectors, that's not to say that all private collectors have looted material or have robbed graves. But in the absence of a clear title, museums will not take these items. There are a lot of coll, private collectors still out there. I hope that we can also build relationships of trust with those private collectors so that they can come forward, feel safe to come forward and say, I didn't know I did anything wrong at the time. I sure recognize that it's wrong now. How do I fix this? And so it would be my hope that they would reach out to individuals like myself who can quietly help them get items and people back to their place of origin, where they rightfully belong. And law enforcement, I want to say this to working with the FBI rt Crime team. It's not there often these art crime team agents are all over the country. And if they can work to get make a wrong right. Mm. They will do it in a quiet way. They're not always looking to throw the book at someone who wants to step up and do the right thing and follow the law. So I think that that's a conversation we really need to keep having with the general public as we try to better educate them about these issues. Okay. Thank you. So Holly, I saw the comment in the chat, and I noticed I was admiring your amazing commitment to the students in involving them in this process and your acknowledgment of their amazing contributions to this. And doctor Bloomquist is remembering that he's thinking about from your perspective as a faculty member, and the journey that you had while having this opportunity and working on your own promotion and tenure. And because this was sounds like a and it took a lot It was maybe somewhat risky for you to dig deep into this around your promotion and tenure process. He's wondering, what can we say about that or thoughts about how the university could support other faculty that might be thinking about these sort of endeavors that are time consuming and maybe could impact their ability to get promoted. So what are your thoughts about that? Yeah, I think we need to better encourage engagement across departments, schools, and disciplines. So I think, you know, within the school of Liberal Arts, you know, many people are doing the kind of work that I'm doing, where they're deeply engaged with community stakeholders. You know, I'm one of many, many scholars at IUPUI doing this kind of what I would call deep and meaningful work with community. I I do think there's a lot of risk. I can tell you that as the media picked up on this story just in week one, actually, day one. We had helicopters flying over us as we were working, and we were on the news that night. And, you know, it wasn't all favorable. In the beginning, this case was met with a lot of anger by a lot of groups. In fact, doctor Zimmerman will tell you that he got some pretty nasty threats for his involvement with the case. You can't believe some of the voice messages on my office phone when I would walk in to my office. And even now, when CVS interviewed us about the case a few years in 2019, I got really threatening messages through my university e mail. They found me online through the university and called me every name you can imagine, and threaten me. I mean, I honestly was going to the parking garage and looking back a lot, you know, on my way to my car, because people were so angry that, you know, this was big government, and we were picking on the little guy and how dare us get involved and help Big Brother. No looking at the real victims in this, who were the indigenous community members, whose ancestors were treated horribly. They were victimized time and time again and treated in ways that no human being should ever be treated. So, you know, this kind of case highlights you know, what we are all now seeing in the media on a very regular basis. We understand what social injustice is. But, you know, in that CBS interview, I called it what it was. I said, This is racism. And boy, did that angry a large group of individuals who came at me very hard. So there is risk involved, but I also think it's the best teaching opportunity I will ever, in my entire teaching career, have. I can't think of a better way to teach my students on the ground what they're learning theoretically in the classroom. Well, I appreciate how when we asked this question about you, you did what many of our faculty do, and they say, Well, this is about students, this is about doing the right thing, it's about the community. And that was your whole response. And I did hear in your comments, an encouragement and a challenge to us as a university community to continue to make this possible because of the importance of making valuable experiences for our students, but also our partnership with the community to do the right thing. And the other pieces of what I took away from your comments were the value of continuing these conversations to help educate everybody about what this means. And so I want to thank you for taking some time with us today to lay this out in such a nice way and to challenge us and to encourage us to learn more. And I know that you have provi provided for us a few links to dive is that you'll get in an e mail afterwards for our community here as a follow up. So we encourage you to not end the conversation today but to continue it. And you can reach Holly, and we hope that you'll be kind to her in your comments. But she's very interested to hear more and to have some more conversation. We hope that these conversations always bring some of our various disciplines and schools and programs together from all of our perspectives to expand our knowledge and our opportunities and our research endeavors. And so we can't thank you enough today, Holly for joining us in this conversation. We like to be aware of time because we know everybody's got Zoom fatigue, and that we probably need a little bit of time to prepare for our 1:00 meetings. So we want to thank Holly. Please give your applauses, however you can give her the air applause for this work and keep up with us. We hope that you'll come back and participate with us next month. Nuri said that we'll be doing an unusual, since this is our first year of having these conversations to do an overview of what we've been doing, share some data with you, and maybe some questions of our own so we can learn about how we as a center for translating research to practice can better meet the needs of our university and our broader community. So we thank you for coming today. We hope you have a wonderful holiday. If we didn't mention it, those faculty that are interested in community engaged research, the Banz Community Fellow application and the Banz community Scholar applications are now open, and you can begin looking at those. There are two information sessions scheduled in then the coming months. And there's also the Banz Petronio Translating Research into Practice Faculty Award. That application is now also open. You have time To check those out if you have questions, you're encouraged to contact me or Nuri, and we will get you some information. So thank you all for coming today. We will just hang on here if there are some other burning questions or comments and stay on for a few minutes with Holly, if you'd like to stay on. Otherwise, we thank you and wish you good well holiday wishes for the next coming weeks, and we'll see you in December for our next conversation as part of our series. So have a great day, everybody.