Does Your Local Museum or University Still Have Native American Remains?

In 1990, Congress passed a law recognizing the unequal treatment of Native American remains and set up a process for tribes to request their return from museums and other institutions that had them. The law, known as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act or NAGPRA, sought to address this human rights issue by giving Indigenous peoples a way to reclaim their dead.

But 33 years after the law’s passage, at least half of the remains of more than 210,000 Native Americans have yet to be returned. Tribes have struggled to reclaim them in part because of a lack of federal funding for repatriation and because institutions face little to no consequences for violating the law or dragging their feet.

This database allows you to search for information on the roughly 600 federally funded institutions that reported having such remains to the Department of the Interior. While the data is self-reported, it is a starting point for understanding the damage done by generations of Americans who stole, collected and displayed the remains and possessions of the continent’s Indigenous peoples — and the work done by tribes and institutions to repatriate those Native ancestors since.

What does “made available for return” mean?

Under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, when an institution establishes a connection between tribes and remains, it must publish a list of the tribes eligible to make a repatriation claim. The remains are then made available for return to the tribe(s). Once a tribal claim is made, physical transfer may occur. Many remains have been physically returned to tribes, but data on this is spotty because the law does not require institutions to report when these transfers occur.

Ten institutions hold about half of the reported Native Americans remains that have not been made available for return to tribes. The list includes some of the country’s most prestigious universities, as well as federal agencies whose development projects disturbed Native American burials, and state museums whose archeology and anthropology programs originated with the excavation of key Native American sites and mounds.

Most of these institutions spent years after the law’s passage prioritizing scientific interest in the skeletal remains and objects above the human rights of tribes. Institutions also maintained an unwillingness or inability to bear the costs of taking inventory and fully consulting with tribes. [Read more about why these institutions still have the remains of thousands of Native Americans.]

Ten institutions hold about half of the reported Native American remains that have not been made available for return to tribes.

• University of California, Berkeley – 9,075
• Illinois State University – 7,590
• Ohio History Connection – 7,167
• Harvard University – 6,165
• Indiana University – 4,838
• University of Kentucky – 4,504
• University of Tennessee, Knoxville – 4,329
• Tennessee Valley Authority – 3,539
• Department of the Interior – 2,970
• University of Alabama – 2,939

All of these institutions have used a loophole in the law that allows them to keep Native Americans remains if they deem them as “culturally unidentifiable,” meaning they can’t be culturally affiliated to a modern-day federally recognized tribe. Tribal representatives have long criticized NAGPRA for giving institutions the final say in these decisions.

In recent years, most of these institutions have expressed a greater willingness to engage with tribes, and several have brought on new staff to meet these goals. One of the main challenges many so-called repatriation coordinators face is figuring out exactly what is in their museums’ possession.

This accounting issue persists at the national level. The amount of unrepatriated Native American remains reported by institutions is a minimum estimate of individuals and institutions frequently adjust these numbers when they reinventory groups of remains. Some institutions that are subject to NAGPRA have also entirely failed to report the remains in their possession.

As a result, the numbers provided are best taken as estimates. The actual number and geographic scope of what’s held by publicly funded institutions is larger than what is presently documented.

For example, in August, the University of North Dakota announced it had found more than 250 boxes of Native American remains and belongings that had not been previously reported to federal officials. No penalties have been assessed against the institution, which has two years from the time of the discovery to complete an inventory.

“The University is now beginning the process of identifying those ancestors, which will allow them to be returned to their tribes,” said a university spokesperson. “UND remains committed to seeing the repatriation process carried through to completion.”

Just last year, the University of California, Berkeley, which has the largest amount of Native American remains in the country, completed a review of its holdings after facing questions over whether they had accurately cataloged the unrepatriated remains of more than 9,000 Native Americans that they reported to federal officials. A school spokesman said that what it has reported now represents a “close estimate” of the Native American remains that it holds.

In October, the Interior Department, which is led by the first Native American to serve in a cabinet post, proposed changes to NAGPRA regulations intended to expedite the return of ancestral remains and funerary belongings to tribes within three years. Some who work on repatriation for institutions and tribes have raised concerns about the feasibility of this timeline. Without the proposed regulations, the department projected that repatriating the rest of the Native American remains would take another 25 years roughly to complete at the current pace.

Data Sources and an Interactive Map in the original story, follow link to view.