Grave-Robbing, Private Collections and Repatriation: A Case Study on Cultural Heritage in the United States

This article discusses the 2014 case study of Don Miller, during which over 5,000 artefacts and 2,000 human remains were seized by the FBI’s Art Theft Department from the 91-year-old’s home in Indiana, US. This case study is presented in the context of changing public and legal opinions of cultural heritage, particularly as it pertains to Native American cultural patrimony and human remains. This case study has been chosen for scrutiny because it exemplifies attempts reckoning of dissonant pasts at a state level through the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), while simultaneously unravelling some of the historical factors that make Don Miller’s large private collection not so much an outlier as it is symptomatic of social and legal worldviews of the 20th century. Finally, this article hypothesises the increased discovery and inheritance of difficult and tarnished personal collections in the United States. This article advises that the ‘Miller’ case, while hopefully an extreme, is an example of what may become prolific in the next few decades as generations who are to inherit these collections become increasingly more uncomfortable with their difficult content.