Nearly a century ago, an amateur archaeologist and showman named Ralph Glidden dug up Native American burial sites on Catalina and other Channel Islands off Southern California’s coast. To him, the human remains and relics were treasures to be displayed in the so-called Indian Museum he opened as a tourist attraction overlooking Avalon Harbor. The museum closed in 1950, and many of those Native American remains — an array of skulls, bones and an estimated 30,000 teeth — sat in storage for decades, overlooked by researchers and far removed from living descendants. But over the last year, the bones finally received what the Gabrielino-Tongva Tribe considers a proper burial. “Now, they have turned to reclaiming ancestral remains, preserving artifacts and telling their own stories in big, new museums.”“I don’t see them as competition,” he said.

Source: Los Angeles Times November 22, 2017 16:00 UTC