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Growing up in my family, we were taught that education was the solution (or one of the most important solutions) to many problems. So, it is not so surprising that I once believed something that many still believe—that education about archaeology will result in better public understanding of what we do, and some level of agreement vis-à-vis the value of archaeology. After experiencing that this long-held belief (or perhaps more accurately, hope) was not always true, I realized the obvious fact that someone can be educated on a topic and still disagree with you. Education does not guarantee agreement with the educator (see Goldstein and Kintigh 1990 for another discussion of this point regarding human remains and mortuary sites). In other words, there is not a single truth, especially on this topic. This is certainly not to argue against education, it is just a reminder about realities. For this volume, Giles and Williams invited eighteen papers from archaeologists who have struggled with a wide range of topics associated with the intersection of mortuary archaeology, public archaeology, and contemporary society. This intersection provides the space and the opportunity for examination of problems and issues that are often not raised in discussions of archaeology or public archaeology or contemporary society alone. The breadth, depth, and diversity of perspectives presented in this volume are both fascinating and enlightening. The chapters are often self-reflexive and attempt to be fair, looking at multiple sides of very complex issues. Museums, governments, news media, and other archaeologists would be wise to carefully read these papers. As an American archaeologist who conducts archaeology in the USA, I find the case studies especially important and relevant since most of the examples are not constrained by the kinds of post-colonial circumstances that exist in the USA and countries like Australia (this is not to say that there are not other constraints in the case studies). At a minimum, these papers represent a different set of perspectives on problems with which all archaeologists and museum professionals have struggled. The volume is unusual because the authors do not simply state their opinions and present certain facts; they use a variety of tools to try to determine what happened, how public opinion may be measured, and how decisions are made.

Pentecostalism began to acquire institutional form at a moment of great vulnerability and heightened xenophobia. The Great Repatriation of the 1930s leveraged almost a half-million Mexicans and Mexican Americans out of the United States. This chapter recovers the life histories of repatriated Pentecostals (Ignacio Mariscal, Isidro Pérez, and Francisco and José Avalos), whose memories of this wrenching experience are imbedded in generally positive accounts of long ministerial careers. This remarkable resilience and creativity in the face of calamity brought about an unexpected outcome, namely Pentecostalism's expansion into new regions in western (Nayarit, Jalisco, Sinaloa, Sonora) and northern (Chihuahua) Mexico, the strengthening of transnational ties, and later missionary expansion throughout the hemisphere and into Europe. Rather than acquiescing as subdued scapegoats, many repatriates recovered prerogatives of citizenship, inserting themselves into and assuming leadership in agrarian ejidos (the Revolution's chief program) and vigorously contesting the custody of temples (federal property). Taken individually and in concert, Pentecostal subaltern responsive tactics carried strategic implications and yielded important results over time.

This chapter illustrates the conditions of the Great Depression in the region and the failure of local and state governments to deal with the worst consequences of the international economic crisis. Public aid remained almost non-existent, but when it did come, local and state politicians wielded relief policies as the latest in a long line of laws meant to tilt the power in labor relations further away from workers. This chapter examines the objective conditions of life during the 1930s. Continued deportation campaigns, higher unemployment rates, and lower wages exacerbated the problems already present in previous decades. Political solutions to these problems, even during the height of New Deal reformism, proved rare and fleeting as agribusiness interests and conservative politicians maintained control of much of the state despite countervailing pressures.

This chapter provides complementary perspectives on the experiences of French refugees. The first is the perspective of the state and host communities in the French interior. The chapter examines the organisation of official and charitable aid and also examines the role of refugees in supporting the cultural mobilisation of the French nation for war. Originally they were welcomed as the tangible manifestations of ‘German barbarism’, but later on many faced hostility and were seen as a burden. The chapter also argues that in spite of the difficulties and disruptions posed by displacement, refugees successfully maintained communal bonds of solidarity based on the home communities they had left. French refugees were more than the passive recipients of state and charitable aid but actively engaged in managing their circumstances. Finally the chapter considers the return and resettlement of refugees after the war, the moral obligation many felt to return home and rebuild, and role played by memories and commemorations of displacement in post-war French society.

The repatriation movement in the USA has had a profound impact on how human remains are viewed by osteologists and archaeologists. Federal repatriation legislation, including the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA, PL 101–610; 25 U.S.C. 3001 et seq., 1990) and the National Museum of the American Indian Act (NMAIA, PL 101–185; 20 U.S.C 80q et seq., 1989) have led museums to transfer control of collections to affiliated descendant communities. Similar laws have been enacted in the states (e.g. A.R.S. §41–844, §41–865 [Arizona]; Cal. Health and Saf. Code, §8010, et seq. [California]; La. R.S. 8:671, et seq. [Louisiana]; Me. R.S. 13:1371– A [Maine]), with some preceding federal action and others a response to it (Seidemann 2010). Ancestral skeletal remains and objects were once regarded as cultural resources under the authoritative control of scientists (Colwell- Chanthaphonh 2009: 6–12). The struggle for the rights of indigenous people and others to determine disposition of ancestral remains challenged scientific authority and led to self-reflection on the part of the profession. Osteologists and archaeologists were reminded that they are dealing with deceased persons and that their actions are socially constructed manipulations of the dead, not unlike the work of other mortuary practitioners. This work is inextricably concerned with reconstructing identities. This involves both an effort to characterize the identities of past individuals or groups in life and to transform the dead anew, creating new identities for a variety of audiences. The process of identity reconstruction may be considered a re-embodiment of the person and that process is what this chapter is about. We illustrate this discussion with a case study of the analysis and repatriation of individuals exhumed from the Alameda-Stone Cemetery, Tucson, Arizona, USA. We use this example to show how individual and community identities are formed, neglected, transformed, and reconstructed in a large multicultural burial assemblage. The human body is universally regarded as an aesthetic object and an inseparable component of personal identity, but its value as an object of scientific inquiry is perhaps uniquely emphasized in Western thought. Once restricted to science and the medical profession, interest in the materiality of the body has now found a much broader audience.

Using the legal battles surrounding care for ancestors in Hawaiˋi, Johnson queries whether a focus on the politics of religious freedom actually disenfranchises marginalized groups whose religious practices have long been considered suspect by the mainstream.

Australia’s trials ended in April 1951, and just a few months later in September, the San Francisco Peace Treaty signalled that the Occupation would end the following year and Japan would return to the international community. A nationwide petition movement in Japan began calling for the repatriation of war criminals who had been convicted by Allied courts and resided in overseas prisons, such as some of those convicted by Australia who were now imprisoned on Manus Island. Meanwhile, other war criminals who were convicted by Australian courts resided in Sugamo Prison in Tokyo, and the Japanese government was bound by Article 11 of the peace treaty to keep them in prison until the convicting country allowed their release. Article 11 was not enough to reassure the Australian government that the Japanese would respect the decisions handed down in its war crimes courts, however, and this made the government anxious over repatriating the war criminals on Manus. In Japan, the petition movement began to pressure the Japanese government and the Australian embassy for the return of these prisoners.

This essay offers an overview of the El Museo del Norte, a community/university partnership with the goal of establishing a “museum without walls” in Detroit, Michigan. The essay provides some background on the genesis and development of the museum project, as well as it’s scholarly, pedagogical and community goals. Beyond offering a narrative of the project, the essay also engages with some of the conceptual, methodological, and personal questions that shape such public humanities initiatives. As such, it offers a meditation on the challenges and productive tensions that arise when our scholarship and teaching engages with modes of knowledge production that exceed the boundaries of the classroom or the library.

Chapter Four observes the evacuees’ environment as they fought to be allowed to return to Hong Kong and made the largely unassisted transition from pre-evacuation Colony to the difficulties (real and perceived) of life in Australia. They now had the social position of refugees. The eighteen months of separation before the Japanese attack meant families were immediately under strain - at the Hong Kong and Australian ends. The pressure on evacuated families was greater than on those not evacuated, added to by the continuing sense of injustice that many of the latter had deliberately evaded evacuation. The Hong Kong evacuees’ experience is contextualised through comparison with American civilians in the Philippines who were not evacuated and would eventually fare far worse. The vain hope for repatriation to Hong Kong delayed acclimatisation to Australia for many – though now more families realised that they could regain control of their destinies, by the evacuees themselves leaving Australia or by husbands who had been left behind leaving Hong Kong. Meanwhile, demonstrations and petitions calling for repatriation of the evacuees to Hong Kong grew to a crescendo.

Chapter Six argues that the five years elapsed time from arrival in Australia till war’s end transformed the evacuation, for approximately half of those involved, into a permanent though initially involuntary migration. For some women their newly forced independence opened fresh horizons and catapulted them into better lives, often continuing without those husbands (either due to war deaths or post-war separations, the latter typically sparked by husbands’ and wives’ different experiences in those years). Children growing up in Australia also found new opportunities which return to post-war British austerity could not match. When families reunited at war’s end, many stayed in Australia, others fragmented, and some returned to Hong Kong or the UK - but many of these later decided to return to Australia. Essentially – for all its grandiose claims of facilitating the defence of the Colony, and actual aims of preventing loss of civilian life - the only long-term effect of the evacuation had been the accidental and unplanned establishment of a unique ‘lost tribe’; a significant segment of today’s Australian population being descended from the garrison and business community of 1940 Hong Kong.

This chapter discusses how the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and similar law shape religious claims and then conduce to misrecognition of the same. NAGPRA hearings both legally authorize and provide the occasion for the performance of Hawai'ian genealogies in hearings contesting ownership of sacred objects. Law is both complicit in the legitimizing of Hawai'ian religion and limited in its power to shape that religion in the ways it would like. This chapter notes that Hawai'ian political and religious actors competitively and creatively work and rework both their received traditions and emerging ones in the legal spaces provided by state and federal law.

This chapter explores the concept of contemporary rock-art making as a form of repatriation. According to Blackfoot culture the making of rock art is considered a sacred act that involves communication with the spirit world. Current policies help protect existing, tangible rock art, but at the expense of continuing the intangible heritage of communicating with the spirit world. Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park is in the process of creating a new policy which would allow the making of contemporary rock art in a traditional sense.

Outlines the reactions of the French authorities, press and public to the refugees’ arrival in France. Although some French nationals reacted with gestures of solidarity, the refugees faced a considerable level of discrimination and pressure to return to Spain. The most visible sign of exclusion existed on the beaches of the French Mediterranean where close to two hundred thousand refugees were penned into sprawling ‘concentration’ camps. The remaining refugees, mostly women, children and the elderly, were housed in reception centres elsewhere in France where conditions were often very basic. Comparisons are drawn between the reductive and scaremongering reporting of the Spanish refugees by much of the French press, and French officials’ descriptions of refugees arriving in their localities. The chapter reveals how French officials mobilised cultural difference in order to secure the exclusion and return of the refugees to Spain.

The enactment of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) is a powerful tool that in theory affords tribes greater opportunity to bring their ancestors home to rest. Implementation is a different issue. The bulk of the NAGPRA workload undertaken by the Tribe is completed by the THPO bioarchaeologist who works within the collections section. The bioarchaeologist provides an interface between individual institutions and the THPO by protecting the broader Tribal community from having to deal directly with an issue not culturally appropriate for discussion. Because of the subject matter, the bioarchaeologist must prepare information sufficient for the NAGPRA Committee while staying within culturally appropriate parameters to encourage input from the designated spiritual advisors within the Tribal community.

As a region bordering the Russian Empire, East Prussia was (apart from Alsace-Lorraine) the only part of the German Empire to be directly affected by the military operations of the First World War. The refugee crisis in 1914 found everyone totally unprepared. In August 1914 two distinct waves of forced migration took place: in the first, the population fled westwards before returning to their homes in 1916. The second wave concerned Germans who were seized by Russian occupying forces and forcibly settled in the Russian interior. Their repatriation was complicated by the Russian revolution and the ensuing civil war. This chapter discusses the experiences of these two groups, attempts to assist them and how population displacement was represented by contemporaries.

This chapter focuses on refugees in the region that later became the Baltic States and that in the Russian Empire formed the Baltic provinces and parts of Russia’s northwest. It addresses how the refugee crisis was perceived by diverse groups including Russian officials, Baltic Germans, Jews, local peasants, and the emerging national elites, and considers the impact of ethnic belonging on the treatment of refugees and the changes in ethnic policies over the course of the war and the first years of independent statehood. It examines how refugees were resettled against the background of state-building and continuing warfare. Lastly it points out that repatriation was not merely a reaction to expulsions, but a policy with its own strategic purpose, with aims that went far beyond a return to the status quo ante 1914.

This chapter concentrates on the issues raised by the forced resettlement of civilians (mainly Poles) in the Kingdom of Poland by the Tsarist authorities, beginning in 1914-15. Attention is paid to migration of the Polish population from Russian-occupied Galicia into the Russian interior. The chapter focuses on the institutional arrangements made on their behalf including the legal basis of their activity, financial, educational, cultural, economic and religious assistance to refugees, and the implications for creating and maintaining their national consciousness. Particularly noteworthy is the inclusion and participation of at least some refugees in the cultural, educational, journalistic and economic activity of Poles who had settled permanently in the Russian interior and formed ‘Polish colonies’. An important issue concerns the return of refugees to their homeland and the problems this posed at a time of internal and international political upheaval, especially after the Bolshevik seizure of power.

Mass population displacement in Russia began at the very outset of war. People left their homes to evade enemy invasion, but the Russian army also targeted subjects of the Tsar who were suspected of cooperating with the enemy and resettled them in the Russian interior. German and Jewish subjects were disproportionately affected by this policy. The Tsarist state struggled to come to terms with the mass displacement, but finally articulated a policy towards refugees at the end of August 1915 by giving a new Special Council for Refugees overall responsibility for managing the refugee crisis. Local welfare provision became the responsibility of provincial governors. Local authorities played an important role, but refugees relied heavily upon the semi-official Tatiana committee, private philanthropy, religious communities and new national committees.. Social and political upheaval in 1917 created new structures of authority, complicating the process of repatriation. This chapter draws on Russian archives and refugees’ memoirs to trace the contours of the refugee crisis in Russia’s provinces.