(WWJ) - Partial remains of Native Americans that were laid to rest last fall by a Michigan tribe were looted by an amateur archeologist and prolific grave robber, who agents say amassed a horde of stolen artifacts from around the world.
The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, whose range is based in southwestern Michigan and northern Indiana, agreed to take the remains of at least 138 individuals that authorities could not trace back to a specific site or region.
Investigators told Mlive it took almost a decade for the bones to be reburied after they were discovered during an FBI raid of the Indiana home of Donald Miller, a known collector and grave robber who obtained thousands of priceless items -- most of which agents believed he obtained illegally.
During the painstaking process of cataloging and investigating how the artifacts were acquired and where they came from, professionals said the remains given to the Potawatomi were part of more than 500 bones Miller had in his possession.
They were kept in boxes and bags -- skulls kept without bodies and bones scattered in with parts from other skeletons, Matthew Bussler, the Pokagaon Band’s tribal historic preservation officer, told Mlive.
“He carefully carelessly collected cultural heritage going as far as decentering ancestral human remains from all over the world to then just store in his home,” Bussler said, “and to take the various parts of these human beings and mishmash them and put them in different boxes and apparently assemble skeletal structures with multiple people’s bones.”
FBI agents took days to seize the bones and tens of thousands of other items from Miller's Waldron, Indiana home in 2014, even with the help of dozens of people, agents and outside experts and tribal representatives.
Tim Carpenter, who was then an agent with the FBI’s Art Crime Team in the Indianapolis field office, told Mlive the FBI received a tip on their national line in the fall of 2013 about Miller possessing Native American artifacts and some remains.
“The tip wasn’t earth-shattering," Carpenter recalled, but he spoke to the tipster anyways.
“He kept telling me the collection was huge, and I struggled with him for a few minutes to define that,” Carpenter said. “He ultimately told me that he hadn’t counted on personally, but he was estimating the size of the collection to be a couple hundred thousand pieces. I think you can imagine, my reaction to that was pretty heavy dose of skepticism.”
Miller wasn't unknown to the FBI, Carpenter added.
Miller, who died in 2015 at the age of 91, was raised in Rush County, Indiana. During World War II, he went to Army training at the Ohio State University before he sent to New Mexico where he participated in the Manhattan Project, although his role was minor.
Afterward, he studied engineering at the University of Illinois and received his Ph.D. from Purdue. Miller eventually went to work at what is now known as the Naval Avionics Center in Indianapolis.
During this time, Miller began collecting as he had his wife, Sue, traveled the world, oftentimes as Christian missionaries.
When agents first received the tip about Miller's collection, they had already visited him five years prior after Miller told someone he had part of a trigger from a nuclear bomb in his home. The incident was reported and the FBI found “a minor amount of depleted uranium that he had obtained during his years working with the Manhattan Project.”
But nothing prepared agents for what they found when they made a follow-up visit, which Carpenter described as a "jaw dropping, you've got to be kidding me moment."
He told Mlive that he kept thinking, “God, what are we going to do with this?" as the agents uncovered remains from the Easter Islands, New Guinea, Ecuador, Peru, Mexico and from burial mounds from the Great Plains region in the U.S.
They also found bullets from the Civil War, prehistoric axes and Aztec figurines, early Chinese metal weapons, armor, pottery, tools and sculptures -- some over 2,000 years old -- and pre-Colombian pottery, mammoth tusks and fossilized dinosaur eggs. Other artifacts came from Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
“There’s probably not a corner of the globe I could point to where Don hadn’t done some looting activity,” Carpenter said.
The FBI said they worked tirelessly to return the items to their country of origin, but journey to lay the stolen bones to rest proved difficult.
Tribal representatives were called in to help with the Native American remains, which were transported to a warehouse outside Indianapolis and kept in a room "designated just for the ancestors," said Holly Cusack-McVeigh, an associate professor of anthropology at University of Indiana Purdue University Indianapolis who worked on the case.
"They could go in and they could speak to their ancestors," Cusack-McVeigh continued. "They could offer prayer in their language and speak to those ancestors, and that happened many times where descendant community members tribal representatives would go into that space and make prayer and speak to the ancestors in their language, showing them that they would be going home.”
Remains that were traced back to their ancestral homelands were reclaimed by their tribes.
Tribal representatives declined to have some of the smaller remains genetically tested due to their fragile state, which left some of the collection unable to be identified.
The Potawatomi accepted those individuals for burial, with tribe leaders saying they felt relief at being able to rebury them in a safe location.
“The overwhelming joy and feeling of relief that washes over you, once you place those ancestors and their belongings back into the womb of Mother Earth after being imprisoned, inappropriately…knowing that they are no longer subject to that and they are being placed in a safe location where they’re able to continue their journey through that Western door, it’s a remarkable feeling,” Bussler said via MLive.
The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi has chosen not to disclose exactly where the remains are now buried, stating that there are still people like Miller out there who would disturb the site.
“Today, more than we want to accept or believe, people want to find these things,” Bussler said. “It’s rather disgusting but it’s true.”
The journey, Bussler added, although a decades-long ordeal, is a relief and blessing to finally close.
“You do end up feeling like you just increased the quality of a relationship with the spiritual realm” he said. “Those moments are what rejuvenate you and make you strong enough to keep going.”
Miller turned over the collection to authorities, the FBI said. He died without ever being charged with a crime.