ORONO, Maine — In the year he died, Dr. Clarence Edmonds Hemingway — father of famed writer Ernest Hemingway — traveled to Florida and excavated burial sites of extinct native tribes, unearthing and collecting human remains he called “relics.”
Those remains, exhumed in 1928 and marked with the words “Calusa tribe Fla.,” and others from “Timucua Tribe Fla.” eventually became part of the Portland Society of Natural History collection.
When the society closed in 1970, Hemingway’s bone collection and other items were transferred to the Hudson Museum at the University of Maine, which is now working with the federal government and two Florida tribes to return the human remains to their descendants.
“They were never on display,” Gretchen Faulkner, Hudson Museum director, said Thursday.
Little is known about how and why Hemingway went to Weedon Island to dig up the bones, which arrived in Orono in a box with other human remains from the same region, along with a note that the “Smithsonian Inst. men [were] there digging and told me they had taken over 1,300 skeletons.” Hemingway did not make the notation, which also makes reference to “My Indian relics,” since it was made in 1930, two years after he took his own life on Dec. 6, 1928, while his son was finishing “A Farewell to Arms.” Another note states that Dr. Hemingway excavated a “skull and bones of an Indian” from Weedon Island on March 1, 1928.
“That is all we have,” Dan Sandweiss, the Hudson Museum’s chief cooperating curator, said Thursday about the one page typed reference note with five notations, two of which mention Hemingway, that came with the box of bones.
The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which Congress approved in 1990, requires museums and other institutions that get federal money to go through their collections and return human remains and other cultural items to the tribes to whom they belong.
“It was discovered that there were a lot of Native American human remains that had been removed from the land and were in scientific institutions or government institutions, and they had been not repatriated,” David Tarler, who covers training, civil enforcement and regulations for the National NAGPRA Program, said Wednesday. “They were still in collections 150 years later. They were treated differently than other people… who were allowed … to claim remains and hold burials. Native American people and native Hawaiian organizations weren’t given that opportunity. It’s also a civil rights legislation, which remedies that matter of being treated in a disrespected fashion for the people.”
The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act database includes 6,202 records and accounts for 57,230 Native American human remains and 1,232,686 associated funerary objects inventoried by 569 museums and federal agencies. Maine has 148 listings in the database.
“There are others,” Faulkner said of native human remains or burial items in the Hudson Museum collection. “We have worked to repatriate remains to their appropriate tribes.”
Museum leaders found the Weedon Island bone collection in 2002 and had forensic anthropologist Marcella Sorg, a UMaine teacher and researcher, examine the bones. She concluded that they were of Native American ancestry.
Since then, museum leaders have been consulting with the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians and the Seminole Tribe of Florida, because they live in the same geographic region and have “a shared group identity to these human remains,” according to the federal Notice of Inventory Completion, filed Wednesday.
Found in the box from the Portland Society of Natural History collection were “human remains representing, at minimum, two individuals were removed from Weeden [sic] Island in Pinellas County, FL.,” the notice states. “They were excavated by Dr. Clarence Edmonds Hemingway (Ernest Hemingway’s father).”
The human remains, which are noted from the “Calusa tribe Fla.,” represent one male, age 25-40, and one female, age 30-60.
The Calusa lived on the sandy shores of the southwest coast of Florida and are famous for their shell mounds, which can still be found today in many parts of southern Florida, according to the Florida Center for Instructional Technology at the University of South Florida.
Also in the box from Portland were native remains from a male, aged 18-50, from the “Timucua Tribe Fla.” that were removed from Safety Harbor, Florida, at an unknown time.
The Timucua settled in central and northeastern Florida, and it is believed that they may have been the first Native Americans to see the Spanish explorers when they landed in Florida, according to the Florida Center for Instructional Technology. Early explorers often used the language of the Timucua to communicate with other tribes.
“As the tribe died out, it is believed that those who survived … may have later joined the Seminole Tribe,” the University of South Florida website state.
The federal notice was issued to allow others who may want to claim the remains to step forward. If no additional requestors come forward before the Dec. 17 deadline, transfer of control of the human remains to the two identified lineal descendants in Florida may proceed.
At that point, “There will be a discussion between the two tribes about how to proceed,” Faulkner said.
Other items that arrived from the Portland Society of Natural History, founded in 1843, include Navajo moccasins, an East Asian shawl, and a massive mammoth tusk, which are all on display at the Orono museum.
The museum will host the Maine Indian Basketmakers Market on Dec. 12.