Museums and
the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act
(NAGPRA)
What is NAGPRA?
In 1990, a piece of federal legislation called the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, was passed. This law requires any United States agency or institution that receives federal aid to catalog their collections and repatriate any item that falls into the following categories:
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Ancestral remains
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Funerary objects
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Sacred objects
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Objects of cultural patrimony
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Items of Indigenous origin found on Federal or Tribal lands after 1990
While NAGPRA has proven helpful for Indigenous communities seeking the return of their ancestors and material culture, there are flaws with the system. For starters, the final determination over the cultural association of an ancestor or object lies with the institution holding them, and not with the community they came from. This provides a loophole for institutions to deny repatriation claims under the guise of not knowing to whom the item in question belongs. In other cases, determining cultural affiliation can be difficult, and often requires bringing in outside consultants, which in turn costs money. For smaller or poorly funded institutions, this can create major hurdles to assembling an inventory. Other institutions simply don't see this work as a priority, and don't allocate sufficient funding.
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Museums still have a long way to go in getting Indigenous ancestors and material cultural items home. Between 1990 and 2018, 189,415 sets of ancestral remains were inventoried and reported. As of September 2018, only 13,329 of those have been repatriated. (Source: National NAGPRA Program, 2018 Fiscal Year Report)
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The resources listed below provide more background on NAGPRA, as well as stories from the people doing this work.
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NAGPRA as Law and Practice
National NAGPRA Website. This website provides access to a glossary of terms regarding NAGPRA; a summary of NAGPRA; online databases where completed inventories and notices to repatriate are published; and numerous other documents and publications including yearly reports to Congress, NAGPRA Tribal contacts, and a series of training videos, as well as a list of frequently asked questions about NAGPRA policy and implementation. https://www.nps.gov/nagpra/
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"Journeys to Complete the Work" Repatriation Comic. This comic, written by Sonya Atalay, Jen Shannon, and John G. Swogger, was created to "help Native peoples, archaeologists, historic preservation officers, museum administrators and others involved in repatriation decisions to understand both the obligations and the impact of NAGPRA legislation and process." It breaks down NAGPRA in an easy-to-follow format, and explains more about the loophole mentioned above and how harmful those situations can be for Indigenous peoples. https://blogs.umass.edu/satalay/repatriation-comic/
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Decolonizing Museum Practices
Beyond NAGPRA
Museums as institutions have a long history of colonialism. 19th century "curiosity cabinets" were the beginnings of museums in the western world. They were meant to hold "exotic" items from around the globe such as taxonomical specimens, mineral samples, and items from cultures that were often deemed "lesser" than that of the person collecting them. They could—and often did—include human remains, obtained by graverobbing. When cabinets grew into larger institutions, these practices continued. In the United States, items were taken from Indigenous communities and placed into both public and private collections. Ancestral remains were disinterred and sent to colleges and universities as specimens.
Many of these items have not been returned, despite the passing of NAGPRA in 1990. Other museums have begun the work of decolonizing their collections, but this work involves much more than returning items home. Decolonizing a museum means reinterpreting the way Indigenous communities past and contemporary are presented to the public, among other things. These resources provide different perspectives on decolonizing practices within historically colonizing institutions.
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Article: "Penn's Margaret Bruchac Uses Unique Approach to Identify Native American Objects," Katherine Unger Baille, Penn Today, June 16, 2014. Abenaki scholar Margaret Bruchac conducts what she calls "restorative methodologies," which "involves tapping into multiple data streams, including oral traditions, material analysis, university archives, anthropological publications, craft technologies and social memory" to determine the cultural association of an object. "'It sounds like common sense, but, as it turns out, it is rather radical,' she says. 'I try to untangle misperceptions and weave various forms of evidence together to gain a more holistic and accurate picture of peoples, objects and meanings.'" This article introduces her and her work. https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/penn-s-margaret-bruchac-uses-restorative-techniques-identify-native-american-objects
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Blog: "On the Wampum Trail: Restorative Research in North American Museums." Margaret Bruchac focuses much of her restorative work on wampum belts: woven belts of wampum beads that were used to signify political alliances, convey important messages, and acted as mnemonic devices to record history. (More on wampum belts can be found here.) Belts can be hard to identify for those unfamiliar with weave patterns, materials, and other features of them. This difficulty creates a convenient loophole for institutions that don't want to return a belt to its home community; they can easily claim it is culturally identifiable and retain it in their collections. In 2014, Bruchac and her team investigated wampum belts present in thirteen museums and five Tribal Nations across the northeastern United States and Canada, seeking to restore the histories of these belts that had been removed from their contexts. This blog discusses the work they conducted along the way, which was continued for several years following the initial project. At the bottom of the home page are links to several different articles from team members about specific pieces, parts of their journeys, and overall impressions. https://wampumtrail.wordpress.com/
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Blog: "What is Decolonization?" The Abbe Museum in Moneskatik (Bar Harbor, Maine) is leading the way in decolonizing museum practices. Started in 1928 by Dr. Robert Abbe as a trailside museum to display archaeological artifacts, the Abbe has not always practiced decolonization. Dr. Abbe, though he collected artifacts from the Wabanaki Nations of Maine (Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Mi'kmaq, Maliseet, and Abenaki), did not see a connection between the objects he collected and the Indigenous people who lived all around him. In his museum, which he did not live to see opened to the public, the items were displayed as remnants of a people long gone. In the last several years, the Abbe Museum has re-evaluated its approach to telling Indigenous history and begun the process of decolonization, providing a model for other museums to do the same.