Eastern Band Cherokee Tribal Newspaper, The Cherokee One Feather Wednesday, June 18, 2003 EBCI Member to Exhibit at House Gallery in NYC Shan Goshorn, EBCI artist is exhibiting her artwork EARTH RENEWAL, EARTH RETURN in New York City through June 28 at the American Indian Community House Gallery. Her hand-colored black and white photographs address the sensitive issue of repatriation. Repatriation is the process and ceremony involved in returning human remains and tribal artifacts to Indian tribes from museum archives and private collections. "Many people (Indian and Non-Indian) do NOT realize how much of these museum collections are obtained unethically. The other artist I am exhibiting in NYC, Juanita Pahdopony (Comanche) was telling me that she has been involved with her family's fight to reclaim family goods ever since she was a little girl. She was in a museum with her mother and on display there they saw the dress they had recently buried her grandmother in." Until 1990with the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and repatriation Act (NAGPRA), it was not illegal to dig up Indian graves and sell the "artifacts". Indian people have been aware of this dual standard in America and have protested the "Ownership" of the over 2 1/2 million human remains of our ancestors that the Smithsonian estimates is in collections all over the world. (Compare that figure to the 2 million living Indian people in this country according to the 2000 census.) Shan states that she became inspired to join this fight through her artwork after attending the reading of the play Ghost Dance written by her friend Annette Arkeketa (Otoe/Missouria) in the spring of 2001. This play illustrates the struggle a tribal community experiences to protect their dead and to be recognized as human beings. Ghost Dance educates and dramatizes various repatriation issues native people deal with today. For instance, the play reveals how contemporary collectors and museums often acquire objects through acquisitions such as grave robbing. That summer Shan and Annette discussed collaboration.... the production of the play with an exhibition of her photo work, incorporating a repatriation theme. Shan was visualizing an extension of the series she was working on entitled EARTH RENEWAL. In that series, double-exposed hand-tinted black and white photographs imposed images of Indian people in full regalia over that of landscapes, 'emphasizing the original teachings that we are the care givers of our mother, the earth'. Shan decided to extend this series with another set of images that were technically similar- portraits of Indian people in both tribal regalia and contemporary street clothing, coupled with photographs of full drawers and shelves from museum collections. After applying for and receiving research clearance as an Indian scholar, Shan traveled to the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC in April 2002, to photograph in the archives. Once there, " I was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of their massive collection. I spent months sorting through hundreds of negatives and finally completed the body of work EARTH RENEWAL, EARTH RETURN. The collaboration grew to include the multi-media work and poetry of Juanita Pahdopony. When the NYC exhibit Ghost Dance opened on May 9, 2003, all three women attended. After the reception for Shan and Juanita's work, there was a reading of the play, then a panel discussion that included the three artists, plus the following repatriation experts; Jim Pepper Henry (Kaw), Terry Snowball (HoChunk) and Suzan Shawn Harjo (Cheyenne/Hodulgee Muscogee). Shan writes, "There is not another group of people in this country that has to create ceremonies to appropriately retrieve their dead from museum collections and return them into the ground. Another sad note of interest is that many of the funerary and patrimony items that the tribes would like to repatriate cannot ever be used again. The museums have sprayed many of the objects with arsenic, as a form of pest control, which has rendered them poisonous. 'With these images, I want to challenge viewer perception to recognize that drawers are not the proper place for human beings. I want to challenge museum policy of exhibiting and "owning" tribal artifacts and our ancestral remains. And I want to challenge society's way of thinking of Indian people as archeological studies and show them instead as the real people they are. People who deserve- in life as well as death- to be treated humanely. This is a human rights issue whose message is ridiculously overdue.'