The glass case made the display respectable in the institutional sense.

The inherent exhibitionism of what was happening was not questioned in the way it would be questioned later.

The Shift In Understanding — Why The Display Ended

The removal of the miner from public display in the 1970s was part of a broader cultural and political shift in how American institutions handled the remains of Indigenous peoples.

The American Indian rights movement that developed through the 1960s and into the 1970s — shaped by the same currents of rights activism that characterized the era — brought sustained pressure on museums, universities, and federal agencies to reconsider their custody and display of Native American human remains.

Indigenous activists argued, with increasing force and sophistication, that the institutional possession and display of their ancestors was a continuation of the colonial dispossession that had shaped American history — that human beings whose only offense was dying before Europeans arrived were being kept in cases and examined and displayed as though the communities they came from had no standing to object.