New Federal Rules Aim to Speed Repatriations of Native Remains and Burial Items; ProPublica, December 8, 2023

Mary Hudetz, ProPublica; New Federal Rules Aim to Speed Repatriations of Native Remains and Burial Items

"The Biden administration has revised the rules that institutions and government agencies must follow to comply with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act — a law long hampered by limited funding and the unwillingness of many museums to relinquish Indigenous remains and burial items.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to hold a U.S. cabinet position, said Wednesday that the regulations will “strengthen the authority and role of Indigenous communities in the repatriation process” by requiring institutions to defer more to tribes’ knowledge of their regions and histories in their decision-making about repatriations.

Thirty-three years ago, Congress passed NAGPRA to prevent grave looting and push museums to return human remains and items excavated from Native American gravesites to tribes. But the promise of repatriation that many tribal nations once saw in the law has not been fully realized, with federal data showing institutions continue to store about half of the 200,000 ancestral remains they reported holding following passage of the 1990 law.

This year, ProPublica’s Repatriation Project investigative series revealed that archaeologists and scientists at some of the nation’s top universities and museums have exploited loopholes in NAGPRA to delay or resist turning over holdings reported under the law."

Search for missing Native artifacts led to the discovery of bodies stored in ‘the most inhumane way possible’; NBC News, September 4, 2022

Graham Lee Brewer, NBC News; Search for missing Native artifacts led to the discovery of bodies stored in ‘the most inhumane way possible’

"Since the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990, federal law has required institutions that receive federal funding to catalog their collections with the National Parks Service and work toward returning them to the tribal nations they were taken from. But the University of North Dakota has no entries in the federal inventory, even though its administrators acknowledge it has possessed Indigenous artifacts since its inception in 1883.

The discovery at UND is illustrative of a wider, systemic problem that has plagued Indigenous communities for centuries. Despite the decades-old law, more than 100,000 are still housed in institutions across the country. The action and apology by North Dakota administrators points to a national reckoning as tribal nations are increasing pressure on public universities, museums and even libraries to comply with the law and catalog and return the Native American ancestors and cultural items in their possession."