Mackenzie Edwards
Professor Andrella
HIST 281
17 November 2024
NAGPRA and Repatriation: The Past Meets Present
NAGPRA ( The Native American Graves Protection and Repratriotion Act) is a federal law that was created in 1990 meant to do as it says in its name—protect Native American gravesites and repatriate bodies and cultural artifacts to their respective groups. According to the National Parks Service, “Congress also acknowledged that human remains and other cultural items removed from Federal or tribal lands belong, in the first instance, to lineal descendants, Indian Tribes, and Native Hawaiian organizations.” Currently, we are going over 30 years of having enacted this law, but upon reading an article from Indian Country Today headlined “Arizona State University Ranks Near Bottom in NAGPRA Compliance,” I learned that they apparently have only returned less than two percent of the Native remains they are in possession of. Arizona State University’s School of Human Evolution and Social Change is literally built on the lands that the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Community’s people once called home and not only that but they also have the remains of 800 Native Americans inventoried in a different part of campus. This all is ironic considering that many people affiliated with ASU were important in passing NAGPRA, so it is important that we delve into the surrounding history in order to grasp the full picture.
The United States of America has a long, dark history of forcefully taking the land, rights, resources, and even corpses of Native Americans. Colonizer groups of the early United States had put bounties on Native American scalps as proof of death and would offer cash prizes for collecting them to make their mission of taking control over already inhabited expanses of land easier as opposed to working out a diplomatic course of coexisting (Redd). A formal declaration was seven made by lieutenant governor of the Province of Massuchusetts Bay in 1755 that targeted the Penonscots group. According to David Sharp of AP News, the decoration promised “$12,000 in today’s dollars for the scalp of a man, and half that for a woman’s scalp. The amount was slightly less for a child. Settlers who killed Indigenous people were sometimes rewarded with land, in addition to money, expanding settlers’ reach while displacing tribes from their ancestral lands.” These scalps became symbolic to the American colonizers as territorial expansion and the opportunity of economic advancement. It was common practice by settlers later on to take trophies such as scalps to keep or trade and/or sell among each other which would cause these remains and other important items to get separated from their rightful owners. In addition to this, unrightful archaelogoical exploitss unearthing Native burial sites would have also contributed to the possession of these things by many institutions. Museums and universities all across the country would have gotten many if not all of the items in their collections from the systematic genocide of Native peoples of years past. NAGPRA states that “Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony” must be returned but that is largely up to the discretion of those who are in current possession of them as they have to inventory these items of which many are improperly done or unaccounted for in order to try to retain possession of them (“Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (U.S. National Park Service)”).
You would think that it would be a relatively simple in nature task immediately get to work on after the passing of the law in 1990, but many groups like Arizona State University have not given up their collections to their respective nations yet. While it would be untrue to say that these institutions are steadfast against or apathetic about returning the remains and items, it is not possible for all Native nations that are interested in repatriating their ancestors and items partly due to bureaucratic obstacles and the Act itself. For repatriation of remains, lineal descendants have claim over them as well as “the appropriate Native tribe or Native Hawaiian organization…However, the Department of Interior, in regulations adopted after this court case, has indicated that only those tribes commonly thought of as ‘federally-recognized,’ as well as Alaska Native corporations, are included under NAGPRA”(Trope). Thus, accessing this option is not possible for people who do not have biological, lineal right or those nations not federally recognized, giving the another hoop to have to jump through in order to reclaim what has long been taken.
Works Cited
Ellefson, Sam, and Aspen Ford. “Arizona State University Ranks near Bottom in NAGPRA …” Indian Country Today , 10 June 2024, ictnews.org/news/arizona-state-university-ranks-near-bottom-in-nagpra-compliance.
“Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (U.S. National Park Service).” National Parks Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, www.nps.gov/subjects/nagpra/index.htm. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.
Redd, Wyatt. “Governments Used to Pay for Native American Scalps Which Made Scalping a Booming Business.” History Collection, 15 Sept. 2018, historycollection.com/governments-used-to-pay-for-native-american-scalps-which-made-scalping-a-booming-business/.
Sharp, David. “Penobscots Don’t Want Ancestors’ Scalping to Be Whitewashed.” AP News, AP News, 4 Dec. 2021, apnews.com/article/penobscots-indigenous-history-scalping-colonial-america-adf590d261599302207b8c377b711169.
Trope, Jack. “Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.” Society of American Indian Government Employees, 2013, saige.org/words/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/NATIVE-AMERICAN-GRAVES-PROTECTION-AND-REPATRIATION-ACT-saige-2013.pdf.