UW-Oshkosh buried facts about mishandled Native American remains. Sunshine laws uncovered them

Last April the Wisconsin Examiner published an examination of the way that Native American human remains have been retained by public institutions in Oshkosh long after the passage of a federal law that was intended to speed their repatriation to the tribes that once inhabited the area.

The article included some startling details that demonstrated the callousness of the institutions, especially the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. But the university also managed to keep even more graphic information out of the story.

For example, readers did not learn that a Native American skull, collected in Oshkosh on the south bank of the Fox River, had been stolen in 1990 from an exhibit case on campus and “broken during the bungled burglary.” Nor did they read about the time that the remains of one individual went missing from an excavation where an assistant professor found 43 burials but apparently lost track of one “en route to the archaeology laboratory.”

The reason that these details, contained in inventory records that had been easily accessible at the campus library, were not included in my story was that during the course of my reporting university officials stepped in and placed the documents in a restricted area. I was in the midst of reviewing the documents when the university decided that they needed to be kept from the public on the basis of what turned out to be a completely bogus rationale.

Last month the university released a full set of the inventory records under prodding from the Winnebago County district attorney, whose investigation showed that UW Oshkosh had repeatedly and egregiously manipulated state law.

The DA’s investigation confirmed what I had asserted in a complaint filed in July, that UW Oshkosh had made a mockery of the state’s public records law, slow-walking responses, making up excuses for redacting information and misapplying doctrines like the attorney-client privilege. Among other things, I pointed out, UWO had withheld documents from me that it had released to another news organization and claimed that it had the right to keep from me a copy of an email that I myself had written.

By clearing the inventory documents off the library shelves, UW Oshkosh forced me into filing a public records request, a process that university officials knew would frustrate and delay my fact-gathering. The school, part of a system that claims to be all about “sifting and winnowing” knowledge  in the search for truth, thus managed to keep information away from the citizens who pay its bills.

A partial set of records was released last summer, including the details listed above. But those documents arrived months after the deadline for publishing the original story. It was last summer’s records release, which did not come close to meeting the letter of the law, that prompted me to file the complaint with the local prosecutor and with the Wisconsin Department of Justice. (DOJ relayed my criticism to UW System lawyers but said it could go no further since it might be required to defend the university in court.)

At the time, I had recently closed down a hyperlocal news website, the Oshkosh Examiner, where I was an active user of the Wisconsin public records law. The law requires government agencies to cough up documents that, in many cases, can put them in a negative light or at least allow access to detail about actions and decisions that officials may be uncomfortable about disclosing.

Over the years I had filed public records requests with essentially every state or local agency that operates in Oshkosh and Winnebago County. Some of these requests were made over the telephone and fulfilled within a matter of hours. Others went through a more formal process and had some information redacted. But, unlike UW Oshkosh, these other agencies complied with the law even when they knew that the documents might show them in an unfavorable light.

For a long time, UW Oshkosh had been exemplary in responding to requests for information. I spent more than two decades teaching journalism at UW Oshkosh, and for years I regularly invited the school’s public records person to guest-lecture in my reporting class and relied on her to teach my students some techniques they could use to improve their chances of getting useful information out of the reams of documents that an institution like UWO generates.

In my own reporting, I had used public records to bring a degree of transparency to what top administrators were up to. For example, I was able to document the vast amount the cash-strapped university was spending to establish a marching band and to provide background information about the resignation of the school’s winningest football coach. (It turns out UWO was worried that he had violated state and NCAA regulations on fundraising).

But the university appointed a new custodian of public records in 2022, and the situation changed dramatically. Her arrival came as UW Oshkosh grappled with falling enrollment and rising financial difficulties. Her efforts to delay and deflect finally came to a head when she sent me the Native American remains inventory with what appeared to be random redactions of short sections of text. 

Redactions are perfectly allowable under the law, with one condition: The person making the redactions must provide enough information about the basis for a redaction so that it can be challenged in court. In this case I had already seen enough of the inventory to be very confident that these redactions actually hid nothing of substance and had been inserted only to justify the withholding of records for internal review.

In my complaint I had asked that monetary sanctions be levied against Elizabeth Hartman, the university records custodian who had mishandled my requests, “for repeated violations of the law.” But Christian Gossett, the deputy DA who oversaw the investigation, chose to resolve the matter informally in part because Hartman has “left employment with the university and now practices with a private law firm.”

It isn’t clear why the university was so intent on keeping its inventory records under wraps, although some clues emerged last fall. That’s when the National Park Service published a pair of notices in the Federal Register announcing that UW Oshkosh was prepared to repatriate eight sets of human remains.

The notice of repatriation is an important step in getting remains out of the hands of museums, universities and other government agencies and back to the control of Native American tribes. One of the goals of last April’s article was to bring attention to the issue of repatriation in hopes that publicity would speed the process along.

The Federal Register notices highlight a problem for UW Oshkosh — its inventory records, prepared in the mid-1990s to comply with federal law, apparently are incomplete and understate the extent of its holdings.

For example, the university is proposing to repatriate six sets of remains found at a construction site in 1975 on the northern shore of Lake Butte des Morts in Winnebago County. But the language in its earlier inventory indicates that only three sets of remains had been found.

The professor who handled that excavation also found a “substantial number of artifacts,” which the university now says are more than 100. It’s possible that some of the remains, which in many cases are individual bones rather than complete skeletons, had been mixed in with the funerary objects.

In another case the school is proposing to repatriate two sets of remains from Green Lake County, remains that are not described in its original documentation. They had been donated in 1994, and “in 2022, employees at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh identified them while inventorying the finds from the site,” according to the Register notice.

UW Oshkosh has refused to answer specific questions about its holdings. But in the case of the Green Lake remains, the timing of the identification squares with a comment that David Grignon, director of historic preservation for the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin, made last spring.

“UW Oshkosh, Milwaukee, those two for some reason did not report everything to the tribes,” he told me. “Someone found out about that within the [UW] System and said, ‘Well you better start doing that, make this right.’ So there’s been consultation meetings with the tribes ever since.”

UW Oshkosh has been much in the news over the last six months. Yawning budget deficits that led to massive layoffs and a plan to move academic departments into new alignments call to mind the saying about deck chairs on a sinking ship. Faculty members, who are famously risk-averse, have been pushed so far that they have gotten up the nerve to call for a vote of no confidence in the chancellor, Andrew Leavitt.

For its part the school has blamed its troubles on forces beyond its control: demographics, a stingy Legislature and social forces that have cast doubt on the value of a college degree. Some of that may be true, but the mishandling of Native American remains as well as the mishandling of public records requests suggest that UW Oshkosh has wide-ranging problems of management and leadership.

While I didn’t get everything I had asked for in the complaint, I was genuinely gratified by the response of local prosecutors. They spend much of their time trying to put drug dealers behind bars and to keep drunk drivers off the road, but it was clear they had taken seriously my concerns about the public’s right to know. 

If there’s a message here for other journalists and the general public, it is simply this: Don’t give up if you think government officials are hiding something from you. Going to court can be time-consuming and expensive, but you may find allies in surprising places, such as your local DA’s office.