Sir

Your News report about the law covering repatriation of Native American items in California (Nature 414, 139; 2001) was even-handed and correct — it can be difficult to follow the NAGPRA statute.

As a retired director of the Harvard Peabody Museum, I know the Tlingit totem pole shown in your photograph and it has been returned to the Tlingits. It was a gift from a Mr Harriman, who obtained it from a professional 'collector' who took four such poles in around 1900 from a Tlingit village that was presumed to be deserted. We now know the Tlingits had moved away only temporarily, to protect themselves from a smallpox epidemic.

We have had very good interactions with that tribe. In the mid-1970s (while I was director), Rosita Worl, a Tlingit student in our department of anthropology, helped me put together a major exhibition using the museum's great early (1860s) collection of Tlingit artefacts. Through Ms Worl, I was able to get help from people in Alaska to curate the exhibition; I brought Nathan Jackson, a Tlingit, to the museum for about five months to make a large wall carving. He, Ms Worl and about 10 more Tlingits did a series of public dance performances.

When the museum received the request for the repatriation of the pole, the current director, Rubie Watson, asked Nathan to make a new pole for the museum. On 19 November, Jackson and his family, Dr Worl (who got her PhD in anthropology from Harvard recently) and other Tlingits danced again in the museum under the shadow of the new pole.