4/6/2023 0 Comments Artifact of the massive![]() PICTURED: Museum studies graduate students from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) help care for the recovered artifacts in a facility near Indianapolis where all the recovered artifacts are housed securely and temperature, humidity, and light levels are controlled. “I want to dispel the notion that Don was a responsible collector,” Carpenter told Vanity Fair in 2021. “There was a period where, every summer, he would leave Indiana and drive for vacation to South Dakota and spend weeks digging,” Cusack-McVeigh said. ![]() FBI agents would later piece together, through Miller’s personal slides, passports, film footage, and travel journals, that more than half of the ancestors found had been dug out of the ground in South Dakota in the 1950s and 1960s. ![]() Miller-who died at age 91 in 2015 without ever facing criminal charges-told FBI agents that he used metal detectors on battlefields and Native American reservations to know where to dig. “What we couldn't have known was that throughout the entire estate, in various buildings-the main house, the old family farmhouse, his research building, his barn-we would discover and recover the human remains of over 500 individuals,” Cusack-McVeigh said. They were also surprised to find hundreds of human skeletons, some stored in paper bags, hidden throughout the property. “No photographs and no amount of previous planning and discussion really could prepare you for the scale and the scope.” “It was surreal,” Cusack-McVeigh remembers. It was one thing to know the number of artifacts that they expected to encounter, but a very different thing to see them on the ground. Inside, the team canvassed more than 42,000 items stored in large, self-made exhibit cases in Miller’s basement and other buildings throughout his property. On April 1, 2014, armed with a search warrant and backed by a recovery team of more than 100 people, they entered Miller’s house in Moscow - a village about 45 miles southeast of Indianapolis-with a plan to recover a few thousand sacred artifacts. They spent six months quietly preparing a case against Miller. and abroad over more than six decades.Ĭarpenter, who had been giving guest lectures about the Art Theft Program to Cusack-McVeigh’s museum-studies class, enlisted her for help. In late 2013, FBI Art Theft Program agent Tim Carpenter received a tip that an elderly man in rural Indiana had a collection of thousands of priceless artifacts that he had personally excavated from archeological grounds in the U.S. There’s still some awaiting their homecoming, but the dialogue is happening.” ‘It was surreal’ “And that just feels so good to know that they’re home. “You walk into the room where the ancestors were kept, and it's almost all empty shelves,” Cusack-McVeigh told Native News Online. She’s been caring for the massive collection of stolen artifacts and ancestors the FBI took from Miller’s house since 2014, as well as initiating consultations with tribes about repatriations. “Just yesterday, I was walking through and it was empty shelf after empty shelf,” said Holly Cusack-McVeigh, a professor of anthropology and museum studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Last November, about 450 remains seized by the FBI from Miller’s house in 2014-the majority of the ancestors-were escorted home to South Dakota by delegations from the Oglala Sioux Nation and to Michigan by the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi. The warehouse, where boxes of carefully handled artifacts once reached the ceiling, has emptied significantly over the last year, as the FBI has repatriated most of the stolen artifacts and the ancestors’ remains. ![]() Since 2014, a temperature-controlled Federal Bureau of Investigation warehouse in Indianapolis has become a waiting room for thousands of stolen artifacts and the remains of hundreds of Native American ancestors that had been dug out of the ground by amateur archaeologist Don Miller from the 1940s through the 2000s. Now, with the majority of ancestors and artifacts returned to their respective nations, tribal leaders and experts on the case say the bureau has created a model for timely yet thorough repatriation. Eight years ago, the FBI made the largest seizure of stolen artifacts and Native American human remains in its history from an amateur archaeologist in Indiana. ![]()
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