Penn Museum to host a reading of a play about the battle over Jim Thorpe's bones

Tomorrow, at Penn Museum's Cultural Heritage Center, a chance to discuss the treatment of Native Americans.

Revered athlete Jim Thorpe at the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm.

A revered Olympian. An interrupted funeral. A family's legal fight.

It's the making of a stage production, all right, but it's also a true story, one with far-reaching implications about the treatment of Native Americans in modern history.

Gold medalist Jim Thorpe's controversial burial in northeastern Pennsylvania, far from his Native American ancestors, is the subject of a play, My Father's Bones, written by Native American activists Suzan Shown Harjo and Mary Kathryn Nagle. There will be a staged reading of the play on Thursday, Feb. 12, at the Penn Museum followed by a panel discussion led by Penn Cultural Heritage Center director Richard Leventhal.

The famed athlete's burial wishes had been made known to his family prior to his death in 1953: He would be interred alongside his ancestors of the Sac and Fox Nation in Oklahoma. But on the last of four days of funeral ceremonies, Thorpe's third wife, Patricia, who was not a Native American, and state troopers suddenly removed his body. Without the rest of the family's permission, she had sold his body to the merging towns of Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk East in Carbon County, and in turn, the towns renamed themselves the Borough of Jim Thorpe and built a large monument to Thorpe in hopes of attracting tourists. (Thorpe himself had no association with the towns during his life.)

Thorpe's sons filed a lawsuit against the borough in 2010, citing the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), passed in 1990; repatriation refers to the returning of a person, or their remains, to their place of origin. The sons won their case in a lower court, but that decision was overturned in October by a panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia. The sons have asked the entire court to rehear the case.

Harjo believes the Jim Thorpe case fits squarely within the Native American repatriation laws currently in place, which relate to both human remains and sacred objects.

"Before we got the repatriation laws, we were considered the archaeological resources of the United States of America after we died, and we didn't have human rights," said Harjo, a 2014 winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. "This was our human rights law that recognized our humanity, recognized the wishes of the deceased, recognized the wishes of the next of kin and the descendants."

NAGPRA is complicated, though. According to Leventhal, the laws do not require that Native American items, including human remains, be returned to the nations from which they came — only that the possessing institution must begin the process of identifying those items, and that a conversation is started between the institution and the nation about their possible return.

It also relates exclusively to museums or other artifact-holding repositories that receive federal funding; the question of whether the Borough of Jim Thorpe falls within this law is largely the basis of the appellate court's overturning of the original decision.

It makes sense for the Penn Museum to host this debate: Its Cultural Heritage Center, a think-tank offshoot of the museum, deals with issues of communities' identities and preservation of heritage, and Harjo was a principal consultant on the "Native American Voices" exhibition currently on display at the museum.

Members of the Sac and Fox Nation and residents from Jim Thorpe borough have been invited to participate in Thursday's event.

Philadelphia-based director Matt Pfeiffer was brought in to direct the reading based on a recommendation by A. Zell Williams, the playwright behind last year's Pfeiffer-directed Down Past Passyunk, about the Geno's Steaks "Speak English" controversy. Pfeiffer had been familiar with the Borough of Jim Thorpe because of its proximity to the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, where he works during the summer, but not of the controversy behind the town's namesake. He sees the telling of the story as important because it can open eyes about "one of our nation's great sins" — the ongoing mistreatment of the American Indian.

Leventhal's goal for the discussion is to focus more on the broader issues that NAGPRA deals with rather than on one family's controversy.
"My hope is not to resolve anything," he said, "... but rather to ... take what is, in fact, a relatively small situation and see that as part of a larger set of issues about museums, Native American relationships, and so on, and try to look at this as a single case to open the door for a larger awareness by the audience of the bigger issue."

My Father's Bones, play reading and discussion, Thu., Feb. 12, 5:30 p.m., free, Penn Museum, 3260 South St., 215-898-4000.