History
Following controversy over Native leaders' discovery that the Smithsonian Institution held more than 12,000-18,000 Indian remains, mostly in storage, the museum was established by an act of Congress in 1989, Public Law 101-185 - the National Museum of the American Indian Act, as "a living memorial to Native Americans and their traditions". The creation of the museum brought together the collections of the Museum of the American Indian in New York City, founded in 1922, and the Smithsonian Institution. The National Museum of the American Indian Act also required that human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony be considered for repatriation to tribal communities, as well as objects acquired illegally. Since 1989 the Smithsonian has repatriated over 5,000 individual remains - about 1/3 of the total estimated human remains in its collection.
The Heye Foundation's Museum of the American Indian opened to the public on Audubon Terrace in New York City in 1922. George Gustav Heye (1874–1957) traveled throughout North and South America collecting native objects. His collection was assembled over 54 years, beginning in 1903. He started the Museum of the American Indian and his Heye Foundation in 1916. The Heye collection became part of the Smithsonian in June 1990, and represents approximately 85% of the holdings of the NMAI. The Heye Collection was formerly displayed in the Audubon Terrace location, but had long been seeking a new building. The Museum of the American Indian considered options of merging with the Museum of Natural History, accepting an large donation from Ross Perot to be housed in a new museum building to be built in Dallas, or moving to the U.S. Customs House. The Heye Trust included a restriction requiring the collection to be displayed in New York City, and moving the collection to a Museum outside of New York aroused substantial opposition from New York politicians. The current arrangement represented a political compromise between those who wished to keep the Heye Collection in New York, and those who wanted it to be part of the new NMAI on the National Mall. The NMAI was initially housed in lower Manhattan at the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House, which was refurbished for this purpose and remains an exhibition site; its building on the Mall in Washington, DC opened in 2004.
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