Bush Signs Legislation Establishing New Indian Museum in Capital

President Bush signed legislation Tuesday night establishing a new National Museum of the American Indian as part of the Smithsonian Institution and providing for the return of human remains and funerary objects to Indian tribes.

The heart of the new museum’s collection will be more than a million Indian artifacts transferred to the Smithsonian from the existing Museum of the American Indian operated by the Heye Foundation in New York City.

Bush, in a statement, expressed “great pleasure” in signing the legislation, the result of a political compromise after New York lawmakers battled to keep the Indian museum in New York.

The compromise includes the opening of a $25-million satellite museum in the old U.S. Custom House in lower Manhattan. The Smithsonian will erect a new $106-million museum on the Mall between the Air and Space Museum and the Botanical Gardens, near the foot of Capitol Hill, and build a $44-million storage and conservation center in Suitland, Md., for the Indian artifacts.

The Heye Foundation’s collection is considered priceless, but the museum in New York has not attracted the crowds or the financial backing that the Smithsonian’s museums garner.

Indian tribal leaders and native Hawaiian groups for years have demanded the return for proper burial of human remains kept in museum collections.

Bush said the Smithsonian, in consultation with the tribes, will conduct a detailed inventory of human remains and associated funerary objects in its collections, notifying appropriate tribes of its findings with the aim of “repatriation” of the remains ultimately.