Holly Cusack-McVeigh, associate professor of anthropology and museum studies in the School of Liberal Arts, is the 2023 recipient of the IUPUI Bantz-Petronio Translating Research Into Practice Faculty Award. The award recognizes outstanding interdisciplinary and/or cross-disciplinary research that aims to have a positive impact on people in Indiana and beyond.

Holly-Cusack-McVeigh. Photo provided by Holly-Cusack-McVeigh Cusack-McVeigh is also a public scholar of collections and community curation in the School of Liberal Arts with an appointment in the Native American and Indigenous Studies program.

She will be the featured speaker at the 2023 TRIP awards and fall showcase Oct. 11 at the Campus Center. The event is free and open to the public.

In a conversation with IUPUI Today, Cusack-McVeigh discussed her research, the international case that led her to work with the FBI Art Crime Team and why she “couldn’t resist” coming to IUPUI from Alaska in 2012.

Question: You and your research team work on toxic museum collections and the repatriation of Indigenous cultural heritage. How long have you been doing that work?

Answer: I have worked with Indigenous communities for many years on various community-based projects and repatriation efforts. My collaborations under NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, led to the current work I am now doing on toxic returns.

It’s a really important federal law established in 1990 that allows tribes to claim their cultural heritage, including sacred items, funerary items and objects of cultural patrimony. It also provides a legal mechanism for reclaiming the remains of their ancestors, so they can bring them home in a respectful way for proper reburial.

NAGPRA provides a legal mechanism for doing this important work, but of course, repatriation is older than the 1990 law. I started working for tribes in the Great Lakes region prior to the establishment of NAGPRA. From there I have continued to work with and for Indigenous communities around the world who are fighting to bring their ancestors home.

Q: What brought you to IUPUI?

A: I moved to Indiana from Homer, Alaska, in 2012. I didn’t think that I would ever leave Alaska. But when I saw the job description for my position as a public scholar of community collections and curation, I just couldn’t resist throwing my hat into the ring.

This opportunity to draw upon my anthropological background, and my experience in the museum and cultural heritage fields, was very compelling. As is evidenced, I ended up doing that very thing coming to IUPUI, because the emphasis on public scholarship and community collaboration was so strong.

Q: Would you say that’s rare?

A: I think that IUPUI, soon to be IU Indianapolis, is unique in the fact that the university established these positions. That as public scholars, it’s recognized that a large part of what we do is community-based and grounded in community collaboration.

Shared decision-making is key to successful community engagement. Projects have to be, not only conducted with community input, but conceived with community input from the start. From the earliest stages of a project idea or research proposal, community has a key role in determining how that proposal will be shaped and how that project will be conducted.

Holly Cusack-McVeigh, left, speaks with reporters at the Eiteljorg Museum in 2019, after a repatriation ceremony with delegates from the People’s Republic of China involving items seized by the FBI Art Crime Team in 2014. Photo by James Brosher, Indiana UniversityQ: Your work with the Don Miller home artifact collection is well documented. It involved navigating foreign laws, diplomatic relations and cultural protocols, all within the constraints of FBI practices. Was that new territory to you?

A: This fall marks 10 years on the case for me. As someone who works in the cultural heritage field, I was brought in during the quiet planning phases of this federal investigation, long before we arrived on Don Miller’s doorstep April 1, 2014. Now a decade later, I’m still working with the FBI Art Crime Team and Native nations to return the final groups of ancestral remains and cultural items.

While I knew the subject well, working with law enforcement was an entirely new experience for me, and I never dreamt that I would find myself in the center of such a large investigation. It’s been an unprecedented teaching opportunity for me as well.

For a decade now, my IUPUI undergraduate and graduate students have worked side by side with me conducting provenance research, caring for items in temporary storage, and helping prepare the recovered items for domestic and foreign shipping. My IUPUI students have also played a central role in welcoming tribal delegations to Indianapolis for government-to-government consultation. It’s just been a phenomenal teaching and learning opportunity.

Q: What other projects or research are you working on now?

A: Something that I have increasingly become involved with as I continue to work with Indigenous communities around the world is the issue of toxic heritage: past chemical treatments that took place in a museum setting to discourage pest infestation and help preserve the collections. As items are now being returned to Indigenous communities, there is not always a full understanding of this risk to human health.

In the 1800s, many museums around the world were widely applying heavy metal contaminants like arsenic and mercury and then, later on, synthetic organic pesticides like DDT. Unfortunately there was not always good record-keeping for these historic treatments. Most of the time, you can’t tell if a repatriated item has been contaminated, or if it’s toxic, just by looking at it. To further complicate this problem, the testing involved is often complex and expensive.

Q: Hearing the specifics about the challenges Indigenous communities face regarding repatriation is heartbreaking.

A: Bringing their ancestors home is an important charge for most Indigenous communities, but it evokes a very difficult part of their past. This past trauma is felt in the present. It’s a basic human right to be able to care for your dead properly and assume that those buried will remain undisturbed. And yet, to this day, Indigenous communities continue to fight with museums, universities and other government agencies for the return of their ancestors.

Holly Cusack-McVeigh works with a museum collection at Newfields in Indianapolis. Photo by the Center for Translating Research Into Practice Imagine, after decades of fighting this fight, you’ve finally achieved the goal of bringing your ancestors home for proper care and reburial, only to learn that their remains and funerary items have been made toxic. In some cases, reburial or even storage of cultural items can pose health and safety risks to the living. It’s a very difficult conversation to have with community members when items are returned but pose a threat to the living descendants.

We’re at a point now where there are several emerging national working groups and many tribes, like the Hopi Tribe of Arizona, taking a leading role in this educational message that these toxins exist, that there are ways to test for them, and in some cases make the returns safer for the community.

Q: What advice would you give to students who are interested in pursuing this sort of research or professional path?

A: Find your own place in the field. Seek out those courses and professors who are doing the kind of work that speaks to you. One of the things I love to do is bring my undergraduate and graduate students into the fold and have them involved with the research that I’m doing at every level.

That goes for students from various fields and disciplines beyond anthropology and museum studies. I love to get public history students and even students from outside the School of Liberal Arts who show an interest in repatriation and working with descendant communities.

Q: We’re chatting now because you are this year’s Bantz-Petronio Translating Research into Practice Faculty Award recipient. Why is translating research into practice important to you?

A: It’s important to me because it’s at the heart of getting to the concerns of community members and finding the answers they want and need. In the case of my research, broadly speaking, I don’t have to be an expert at everything. I am not a conservator. I am not a toxicologist. I am someone who works across disciplines to bring people together to solve these problems.

A great example of that: I’ve been asked to organize a panel at the Association on American Indian Affairs’ National Repatriation Conference in Shawnee Oklahoma. I’m pleased to say that the panel is made up of tribal members, conservators, toxicologists and scientists from the American Industrial Hygiene Association, all coming to the table to address these concerns of toxic returns.

It’s important to bring all the different parties together, not just to inform and educate community members about the potential health risks, but to offer viable solutions to these problems, from safe handling and storage in a community setting to identifying a lab that can help them do the necessary testing. For example, is an item repatriated from a museum safe to be worn and to re-enter ceremonial life?

Q: It hadn’t occurred to me that something that has been displayed in a museum for decades or centuries is something that Indigenous communities would still use today.

A: Absolutely. I might add that while a museum might label a cultural item “a mask,” for many Indigenous communities, this is a living, breathing being with the same needs that you and I have for air and sustenance. One of the things my students in my Indigenous Cultural Heritage course learn on day one is that you must divorce yourself from Western concepts of tangible versus intangible, animate versus inanimate.

Museums may label items and treat them as inanimate objects, but for many Indigenous communities, they are the ancestors. They are spirit beings; they are alive, aware and due respect.

Q: Is there anything else you’d like people to know about you or your work that we didn’t touch on?

A: I’d like to brag about my students a little bit. In November, Synergist magazine, a publication of the American Industrial Hygiene Association, featured my IUPUI students who won multiple awards for their research poster at the national level. With support from the IUPUI Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, these students participated in a multi-year research project titled “Hidden Health Hazards: A Team-Based, Interdisciplinary Approach to the Identification and Mitigation of Toxins in Museum Collections.”

Their student research poster, “Dust, Mold, and Heavy Metals: Health Hazards in Museums,” received Bronze Best in Show from the American Industrial Hygiene Association, Best Student Research Poster from the American Industrial Hygiene Association’s National Museum and Cultural Heritage Working Group, Best Student Poster from the Exposure Assessment Strategies Committee, and Best Student Poster from the National Aerosol Technology Committee. I’m quite proud of their accomplishments and recognition.