NAGPRA AFTER TWO DECADES

Abstract

November 16, 2010, marks the 20th anniversary of the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA)Fthe single most important piece of legislation in the United States affecting federally funded museums and their relationship to federally recognized tribes. Late last year, we issued a call for papers focusing on NAGPRA to examine the law in all its wondrous complexity. NAGPRA is a federal law that establishes a process for federal agencies and museums to return Native American cultural itemsFhuman remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimonyFto lineal descendants, and affiliated Indian tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations. The legislation also contains provisions for the intentional and inadvertent discovery of cultural items on federal lands, culturally unidentifiable and unclaimed cultural items, and penalties for noncompliance and trafficking. NAGPRA authorizes federal grants to tribes, Native Hawaiian organizations, and museums to assist with documentation and repatriation, and establishes the NAGPRA Review Committee to monitor the legal process and facilitate dispute resolution. NAGPRA is many things to many museum anthropologists. For some, it is a nuisance, a threat, an unfunded mandate, and unfinished business. For others, it is simply irrelevant to their academic aspirations. For still others, it is an exciting opportunity and a means toward historical reparations and restorative justice. And for still others, it is a difficult and awkward compromise. For Native Americans, NAGPRA has been perhaps equally disquieting. For many Native American communities, NAGPRA is an enormous financial and spiritual burdenFwork foisted on them to help solve a problem they did not create. The return of cultural items can also generate new kinds of problems, such as internal disputes over ownership and how and where to rebury remains. Many tribal representatives continue to express frustration with repatriationFthe museum that is reticent to consult, the disparate policies of different federal agencies. Tribes are exasperated by the fact that 20 years after NAGPRA only some 27 percent of human remains in collections have been affiliated; that some of the objects and ancestors subject to repatriation were long ago tainted by pesticides, including arsenic and cyanide, that are nearly impossible to remove; and that NAGPRA provides legal, but not spiritual or cosmological, recourse to difficult, if not intractable, problems. Still, many Native Americans do see NAGPRA as the opening to finally learn what museums have in their collections, to reclaim objects needed for the survival of traditions, and to rebury ancestors who have sat on museum shelves for too long. For us, NAGPRA has thoroughly affected our collective work. We arrived at the work of repatriation through different routes: Nash was trained in the pre-NAGPRA era, while Colwell-Chanthaphonh came of professional age in the law’s midst. But, when we arrived at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, we both (joined by our colleagues in the Department of Anthropology and the administration) saw NAGPRA as a top priority, and worked to bring the institution back from the precipice of noncompliance. We began proactively consulting with tribes, revived stalled repatriations, and made decisions about the cultural affiliation of human remains. We also resolved to address the problem of culturally unaffiliated human remains, and have now received three National Park Service NAGPRA grants to consult with more than 125 tribes on remains from the Rocky Mountains, Great Plains, and the East Coast. This effort has embroiled us in the recent public arguments over the new regulations on unaffiliated remains (Colwell-Chanthaphonh 2010a, 2010b). Additionally, several months ago, Colwell-Chanthaphonh received a Wenner-Gren research grant to examine how repatriation in the United States has transformed the ethical commitments of Native Americans and museum professionalsFhow the law has rearranged the moral relationship between tribes and museums. Repatriation is an integral part of our professional livesFas it is, now, for so many museum professionals. museum anthropology