A State Agency That Keeps the Evidence of a Fraud

The Michigan History Center functions as the state government's general history museum and archival body, collecting and preserving material across the full span of Michigan's past, from Indigenous history through European settlement, industrial development and twentieth century political life. This broad, state-level collecting mandate is precisely why it, rather than any specialised museum, holds the Michigan Relics: a large body of material that documents not an authentic ancient culture but a real historical event, namely an extensive and long-running early twentieth century hoax, which the Center preserves as a legitimate part of Michigan's documented history regardless of the objects' own inauthenticity.

Treating fraudulent artifacts as worthy of state archival preservation reflects a specific institutional judgment: the objects themselves may be fakes, but the episode they document, how thousands of forged pieces were produced, promoted and believed by many contemporaries over several decades, is a genuine and historically significant Michigan story in its own right, one the Center considers worth keeping evidence for rather than discarding as valueless once debunked. That decision to keep rather than deaccession a known fake reflects the difference between a museum's collecting mission and a private owner's reputation, since a state archive answers to the historical record rather than to any interest in appearing never to have been fooled.