Quick Take
- Narration: Chip Colwell reading his own account is the right call, the personal stakes are audible throughout, and he handles both the institutional and Indigenous perspectives without the detachment that a professional narrator might have imposed.
- Themes: cultural repatriation, Native American rights, the ethics of museum collections
- Mood: Morally serious and deeply personal, with the weight of genuine institutional reckoning
- Verdict: One of the most honest accounts of what it actually costs to do the right thing at a large public institution, neither triumphant nor defeated, just rigorously honest.
I came to this book through a conversation about museum ethics that had been circling around repatriation without anyone in the room being able to name a specific case with real texture. Most of what gets discussed in those conversations stays at the level of principle: ownership, heritage, consent, the universal museum versus the culturally specific one. Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits is something rarer, a first-person account from inside one of these processes, written by someone who spent years navigating it professionally and clearly hasn’t stopped thinking about it since. I started it on a Sunday evening and found it very difficult to put down.
Chip Colwell was the senior curator of anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, and this book follows his direct experience with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, the 1990 federal law that requires museums receiving federal funding to return Native American human remains, sacred objects, and cultural patrimony to affiliated tribes upon request. The law, known as NAGPRA, has reshaped American museum collections over the past three decades, but most of what’s been written about it is either legal analysis or academic anthropology. Colwell’s account is neither. It’s the story of what actually happens in the rooms where these decisions get made.
Four Objects, Four Stories, One Ongoing Argument
The book’s structural choice is its greatest strength. Rather than surveying the repatriation landscape broadly, Colwell follows the trails of four specific objects: a sculpture that is considered a living god by the community that created it, the scalp of a massacre victim, a ceremonial blanket, and a skeleton from a tribe some scholars consider extinct. Each object has a different history of creation, collection, and the specific legal and moral argument surrounding its return. The specificity is what makes the abstraction accessible. Questions about religious freedom versus academic freedom, about whether a community’s extinction changes the moral calculus of repatriation, become concrete when they’re attached to a specific skull or a specific blanket with a specific history.
The massacre victim’s scalp is the hardest chapter. Colwell does not let it be anything else. The history of how the scalp was taken, how it entered museum collections, and what its return meant to the descendants of those who were killed is told without the softening that institutional accounts typically apply. A reviewer described the book as offering “helpful perspective from an archaeologist on a complex subject,” which is accurate but undersells the emotional cost visible throughout these pages.
What the Law Doesn’t Settle
NAGPRA is the frame, but Colwell is most interested in what the law doesn’t resolve. The statute draws lines, but the actual negotiations happen in the territory between those lines, where religious freedom and scientific freedom genuinely conflict, where a tribe’s extinction is contested rather than established, where the legal definition of sacred object doesn’t map onto the community’s understanding of what the object is and does. Colwell’s experience of sitting in those negotiations, of having to weigh obligations that couldn’t both be honored, is what gives the book its particular texture.
A reviewer called it “very thought provoking” and noted that it shares “an insight into how they view science and the study of their people”, referring to the Native American communities whose heritage is at stake. This is the book’s most important contribution: it takes Indigenous perspectives seriously not as a concession but as a substantive challenge to how the museum world understands its own mission. Colwell arrives at the end of the book with his institutional commitments changed, and the account of how that happened is more useful than any policy paper on the subject.
The Author-Narrator and the Limits of Institutional Distance
Colwell reading his own work means you are always aware of the personal stakes. His voice carries the discomfort of someone who has been inside an unjust system and tried to make it less unjust from within, knowing that inside-the-system reform has limits. The narration is not polished in the way professional audiobook performances are, there are moments of hesitation and deliberateness that read as genuine engagement rather than technique. For material this morally charged, that quality is a virtue rather than a flaw.
At nine and a half hours, the book earns its length. The four case studies are detailed enough to be genuinely illuminating without being exhaustive, and the interludes of broader reflection on the state of repatriation in American museums add necessary context without slowing the personal narrative.
Who Should Sit With This Book
Anyone working in museum collections, anthropology, archaeology, or cultural heritage policy will find it essential. But it’s also for anyone who has stood in a natural history museum’s anthropology wing and felt unease without quite being able to articulate it. Colwell gives that unease its full shape and doesn’t offer easy resolution. If you want a book that makes you comfortable with hard questions, look elsewhere. If you want one that makes the questions harder and more important, this is it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to understand NAGPRA before starting this book?
No. Colwell introduces the law and its provisions clearly and early. The legal context is explained accessibly for readers who have never encountered it, and the focus throughout is on what the law means in practice rather than on its technical provisions.
Does Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits take sides in the repatriation debate?
Colwell has clear moral commitments, he believes repatriation is generally the right course and that museums have been too slow to implement it. But the book’s strength is its honest portrayal of the genuine complexity: the cases where scientific value conflicts with community claims, where legal definitions don’t map onto moral reality, where institutions and tribes genuinely disagree about what an object is.
Is this primarily about the Denver Museum of Nature and Science or does it cover the broader landscape?
Colwell’s Denver experience is the firsthand frame, but the book reaches out to cases and institutions across the country. The four objects he follows have histories that extend beyond Denver, and the broader sections on NAGPRA’s implementation survey the national picture.
How does Colwell handle the perspectives of the Native American communities involved, does he speak for them or present their own voices?
This is one of the book’s careful distinctions. Colwell is explicit about the limits of his perspective and gives space to the voices of tribal representatives and community members throughout. He is telling his own institutional story, not claiming to tell the communities’ stories, and that restraint is noticeable and appropriate.
