Protecting Native American Human Remains, Burial Grounds, and Sacred Places: Panel Discussion

Abstract

NAGPRA was passed in 1990. It is a very important piece of legislation because it has legally enforceable provisions, and it does many important things and obviously remedied a huge gap in the law prior to that time. Basically, NAGPRA protects Native peoples' rights in several different ways with respect to four categories of cultural items. The first and most important one involves ancestral human remains, which are defined as physical remains of a human body of a person of Native American ancestry. I think when we get into the panel discussion we'll talk about how that is being interpreted today in a contemporary case > known in the news media as the Kennewick Man case. It deals with very ancient remains of a Native person that were found in the state of Washington, and whether or not contemporary tribes in that area can claim him as an ancestor under NAGPRA. The statute also applies to funerary objects, both those that are associated with human remains r 169 and those that are unassociated. It also applies to sacred objects, which are defined as specific ceremonial objects needed by Native American religious leaders for the practice of their traditional Native American religions. The panelists will discuss how these technical definitions within the statute are being implemented. The final category is objects of cultural patrimony, defined as items having an ongoing historical,