Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act
Based on Wikipedia: Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act
In 1971, a highway construction crew in Glenwood, Iowa uncovered two sets of human remains. One belonged to a white family. The other, to a Native American mother and her child.
The white remains were promptly reburied with appropriate ceremony. The Native American remains were shipped to a laboratory for scientific study.
Maria Pearson, a Yankton Sioux woman married to one of the engineers on that project, learned about this disparity and decided it would not stand. She began showing up outside the Iowa governor's office in full traditional regalia, waiting for an audience. When Governor Robert Ray finally asked what he could do for her, her response was simple and direct: "You can give me back my people's bones and you can quit digging them up."
That confrontation sparked a nineteen-year journey that culminated in one of the most significant pieces of civil rights legislation most Americans have never heard of: the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, known by its acronym NAGPRA, signed into law on November 16, 1990.
The Problem the Law Addressed
To understand why NAGPRA matters, you have to understand the scale of what had been taken.
By 1990, federal agencies alone reported holding the remains of more than fourteen thousand deceased Native Americans. Museums held tens of thousands more. The Smithsonian Institution, founded in 1846, had amassed one of the largest collections in the world. These weren't archaeological discoveries from ancient civilizations—many of these remains had been collected within living memory, sometimes through outright grave robbery.
The late nineteenth century saw a particularly aggressive period of collection. As anthropology and archaeology emerged as academic disciplines, museums and private collectors competed fiercely for Native American artifacts. Some collectors were trained scholars. Many were not—they were adventurers and opportunists who saw profit in plundering burial sites.
The motivations weren't always academic curiosity. The Army Medical Museum actively collected Native American remains to support now-discredited comparative racial studies attempting to prove Indigenous peoples were biologically inferior. Science, in this case, served as a tool of dehumanization.
The twentieth century brought new threats. Residential and commercial development bulldozed through burial grounds that had stood undisturbed for centuries. In a 1982 case called Wana the Bear v. Community Construction, developers in Stockton, California destroyed the ancestral remains of two hundred Miwok people to build houses. A descendant named Wana the Bear sued to protect the site as a cemetery. The California Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the construction company. The dead, apparently, had no standing.
Why Existing Laws Failed
Native Americans weren't asking for special treatment. They were asking for equal treatment—the same protections other Americans received for their deceased relatives.
But the legal system had developed with enormous blind spots.
State laws typically protected marked graves, the kind with headstones and iron fences and family names carved into granite. Native American graves were often unmarked by European standards—a deliberate choice reflecting different spiritual beliefs about death and remembrance. No headstone meant no protection.
Common law—the body of legal precedent built up through court decisions over centuries—had been created by colonizing populations who didn't account for Indigenous burial practices. It didn't contemplate the forced removals, the Trail of Tears, the boarding schools that severed children from their families and traditions. It certainly didn't contemplate that a people's relationship with their dead might be understood differently than property rights to a cemetery plot.
Equal protection under the Constitution, that fundamental promise that the law will treat all people the same regardless of race, consistently failed Native Americans in matters of death. White remains received ceremony and reburial. Indigenous remains received laboratory shelves.
First Amendment protections for religious practice should have applied. For many tribal nations, the proper treatment of ancestors isn't merely cultural preference—it's religious obligation. When remains are disturbed, displayed in museums, or held indefinitely for study, religious practices are directly impeded. But courts rarely saw it that way.
Tribal sovereignty added another layer of complexity. Native nations existed as distinct political entities before the United States existed. They retain rights not specifically surrendered through treaty. No treaty granted the federal government the right to dig up Native American graves or hold their contents indefinitely. Yet the digging continued, and the holding continued, and the legal system provided no remedy.
What NAGPRA Actually Does
The law operates through three main mechanisms: repatriation, disposition, and criminal penalties.
Repatriation—the return of items to their rightful owners—is the heart of the law. Any federal agency or institution receiving federal funding must return Native American cultural items to lineal descendants or culturally affiliated tribes. "Cultural items" includes human remains, funerary objects (items buried with the dead), sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony (items with ongoing historical, traditional, or cultural importance to an entire tribe).
Think about what that means in practice. A museum that accepts a single federal grant becomes subject to NAGPRA. A university archaeology department with federal research funding must comply. The law's reach extends far beyond government agencies into the vast network of private institutions that depend on federal support.
Disposition provisions address what happens when Native American cultural items are discovered on federal or tribal lands after the law's passage. If construction crews unearth a burial site today, procedures kick in immediately. For planned excavations, consultation with potential lineal descendants or tribal officials must occur during the planning phase. For accidental discoveries, strict deadlines govern how quickly consultation must begin and conclude.
Criminal penalties target trafficking. It's now a federal crime to sell Native American human remains without right of possession, or to sell cultural items obtained illegally. The original law made first offenses misdemeanors. A 2022 amendment raised the stakes: trafficking in human remains is now a felony carrying up to a year and a day in prison for first offenses, ten years for subsequent convictions.
The Burden of Proof Problem
Congress tried to strike a balance. Legislators acknowledged that scientists had legitimate interests in studying ancient remains. They also acknowledged that Native Americans, like every human culture throughout history, hold religious and spiritual reverence for their ancestors.
The compromise placed much of the burden on tribes.
When lineal descendants can be identified—when you can trace a direct family line from the deceased to a living person—the remains and associated items belong to those descendants. But when lineal descent can't be established, remains belong to the tribe on whose land they were found, or the tribe with the closest demonstrated cultural relationship.
Demonstrating that relationship requires documentation, often extensive documentation, of cultural continuity spanning centuries. Tribes must prove their connection to remains that were often taken precisely because colonization had disrupted the ability to maintain and transmit such records.
California presents an extreme example. Numerous small bands were wiped out before they could obtain federal recognition as Native American tribes. Without recognition, they have no standing under NAGPRA. The remains of their ancestors sit in museums, legally unclaimed, because the legal system doesn't recognize their claimants as existing.
The 2024 regulatory revision attempted to address some of these concerns. Updated rules from the Department of the Interior now state that museums and federal agencies "must defer to the Native American traditional knowledge of lineal descendants, Indian Tribes, and Native Hawaiian organizations." Traditional oral histories and tribal knowledge carry more weight than they once did. But the process remains slow and cumbersome.
What's Been Returned
The numbers tell a story of both progress and enormity.
Since 1990, the remains of approximately thirty-two thousand individuals have been returned to their respective tribes. Nearly 670,000 funerary objects have gone home. Another 120,000 unassociated funerary objects—items clearly meant to accompany the dead but separated from specific remains—have been repatriated. More than 3,500 sacred objects have been returned.
These figures represent real reunifications. Real ceremonies finally conducted. Real grief finally allowed its proper expression.
They also represent a fraction of what was taken. Museums and federal agencies continue to hold vast collections. Each successful repatriation required years of documentation, negotiation, and bureaucratic navigation. Tribes have had to spend precious resources proving they deserve what was stolen from them.
The Scientific Tension
Not everyone welcomed NAGPRA.
Some archaeologists and physical anthropologists raised concerns about losing access to ancient remains that could provide invaluable scientific information. They pointed out that many tribes migrated to their current territories within the past few centuries. The people living in a particular region in 1800 might have no ancestral connection to remains buried there in 1000 BCE.
The case of the Spirit Cave mummy illustrates this tension. Discovered in Nevada in 1940, the naturally preserved remains were radiocarbon dated to approximately 10,600 years old—among the oldest human remains ever found in North America. For decades, the remains sat in the Nevada State Museum while scientists and tribal representatives argued over their disposition.
Scientists wanted to study the remains, which could reveal information about early human migration to the Americas. The Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe claimed cultural affiliation and wanted the remains returned for proper burial. The dispute wound through courts and administrative proceedings for years before the tribe's claim was finally recognized.
Critics charged that anti-scientific sentiment had infected the political process. Supporters countered that "scientific value" had been used to justify dehumanizing treatment of Indigenous peoples for two centuries, and that Native Americans had the same right as anyone else to determine how their ancestors would be treated.
Maria Pearson's Legacy
Maria Pearson didn't live to see every victory, but she saw enough.
After her successful confrontation with the Iowa governor led to the Iowa Burials Protection Act of 1976—the first state law specifically protecting Native American remains—she didn't stop. She lobbied Congress. She testified at hearings. She connected with activists across the country who shared her conviction that their dead deserved dignity.
The 1987 looting of Slack Farm in Kentucky helped build public support for her cause. Grave robbers destroyed a five-hundred-year-old burial mound, tossing human remains aside while stealing whatever they thought might have market value. The images shocked the nation and made the abstract debate about repatriation suddenly concrete and visceral.
Protests at Dickson Mounds in Illinois, where a museum displayed Native American skeletons as a tourist attraction, similarly shifted public opinion. The sight of human beings treated as exhibits—something that would never have been tolerated for white remains—clarified the moral stakes.
Pearson has been called the "Rosa Parks of NAGPRA" and the "Founding Mother of the modern Indian repatriation movement." Both titles acknowledge what she accomplished: she transformed the conversation from one about scientific specimens and cultural artifacts into one about human beings, human dignity, and the basic right to bury one's dead.
The Work Continues
NAGPRA remains imperfect. The burden on tribes is heavy. The process is slow. Federal recognition requirements exclude communities that were destroyed before they could navigate the bureaucracy. Some institutions have been slow to comply, requiring civil penalties to motivate action.
But the law established a principle that hadn't existed before in American jurisprudence: Native American dead are not specimens. They are not artifacts. They are ancestors, with descendants who have rights, and those rights matter.
Every return represents a small healing. Every ceremony finally conducted represents a wrong partially addressed. The thirty-two thousand individuals who have gone home represent thirty-two thousand stories of theft and recovery, of grief and resolution, of a country slowly, inadequately, incompletely trying to reckon with what it did.
Maria Pearson just wanted her people's bones back. She wanted them to quit being dug up. It took nineteen years of fighting to turn that simple demand into law, and more than three decades of implementation to begin the actual work of return.
The work isn't finished. Given the scale of what was taken, it may never be finished. But it continues, one set of remains at a time, one ceremony at a time, one ancestor finally coming home.