Tribes' human remains and cultural items have been scattered across the U.S. Here's how they get returned

Alida Monteil was visiting an Arizona museum several years ago when she encountered an exhibit that shocked her.  

“I remember seeing human remains, human skulls, full skeletal remains inside,” said Monteil, a citizen of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe and the cultural resources coordinator at the Inter Tribal Council of Arizona.

Monteil said she felt that even though she was upset by the display, she could imagine how much more troubling it would have been to the descendants of the people who had been dug out of their graves and put in a museum. 

“It was disturbing to the O'odham who went there to see their relatives like that, in the glass case,” she said. “And it's hard to believe that used to happen.”

Those kinds of displays are changing now. Many museums have been engaged in repatriations of human remains and funerary items, and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, known as NAGPRA, helped end the display of such items nationwide.

In June, the National Park Service, which administers repatriations and the budgets to support them, announced its latest round of grants. The Hopi Tribe and the Arizona Museum of Natural History each received a grant to support research and documentation. Both have been engaged in this process for years, but these were new grants to support their work. 

NAGPRA, enacted in 1990, requires all institutions, from museums to county sheriff’s departments, that accept federal funding and who have human remains, funerary, ceremonial or sacred items, and objects of cultural patrimony in their care to develop inventories, said Arizona State Museum Director Patrick Lyons. The National Park Service and tribal communities receive these inventories and summaries to be used during the repatriation process. The law also calls for consultation with tribal governments and Native Hawaiians in returning these items to their home communities. 

"The NAGPRA planning grants help us coordinate with tribal museums, state and federal agencies to make sure there is a process for repatriation of the remains that are discovered or may be in museum archives," said Monteil. 

And, she said, "I think we're at a point where there's cooperation and collaboration between museums and tribes, and the information that is obtained is sacred and can be guarded in a manner that museums and institutions support." 

One of the nation’s most studied tribes

The Hopi Tribe will use part of it its $89,000 grant to support staff salaries, said Stewart Koyiyumptewa, an ethnohistorian at the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office. “Hopi people are one of the most studied tribes, and thus they have the most collections throughout the United States in terms of cultural items,” he said. “Some of these items may have been taken illegally or before there were any laws in place.”

In the 19th century, for example, thousands of Indigenous people's remains and the items placed in their final resting places were dug out of their graves to be sold by dealers or collected by anthropologists, museums and government agencies. People removed ceremonial regalia from storage caves. Amateur archaeologists, farmers, ranchers and others regularly picked up cultural items to decorate their homes or to sell.

Many of these items, and thousands of human remains, ended up in museum exhibits and institutional archives. 

“We try to work with the museums to accomplish cultural affiliation repatriation,” said Koyiyumptewa. In the process, he said, “We've gained some good relationships with museums in trying to bring back home artifacts and ceremonial items.” Koyiyumptewa said that the only cases where the tribe isn’t successful in bringing cultural patrimony home are when the pieces are treated with arsenic and other pesticides to preserve them. Then, arrangements are made with the institution to care for those items.  

Natural History Museum to document items found in archaeological digs

The Arizona Museum of Natural History in Mesa has had items inventoried for NAGPRA purposes since the 1990s, said Emily Early, the museum's curator of anthropology. However, the museum became aware that human remains may be lurking among more mundane items tucked away in their archaeological archives.

“There has been a trend in ancestors being discovered amongst animal bone that was found archaeologically,” said Melanie Deer, the natural history museum’s anthropology collections manager. “We have hundreds of boxes of animal bone and there was no way just two of us could go through them all.” Their $53,000 grant will fund a position for a staff member who will work on these collected items, document any ancestral remains and work with tribes to repatriate them for reburial.  

The museum also aids visitors to educate themselves about the first peoples of the area in an appropriate way. On a visit to the museum’s Mesa Grande Culture Park in central Mesa, baskets, stone tools, shell jewelry and other historical items help tell the story of the Hohokam, the ancestral people who lived in the Valley in pre-contact times. These items are considered appropriate for display and education, Early said. The museum works closely with neighboring tribes who number among the descendants of the Hokokam, the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community and the Gila River Indian Community, to ensure cultural appropriateness and provide perspective on what's on display.

Lyons of the Arizona State Museum also said the repatriation process has led to stronger ties. "Because NAGPRA requires establishing cultural affiliation, it has led to decades of incredibly important collaboration between archaeologists and descendant communities to pull together all the various kinds of information that illuminate the relationships between ancient and extant groups," he said.

Early also provided a lesson in something that irks both scientists and tribal citizens – amateur artifact collecting. She pointed out a collection of stone metates, grinding tools, that people had dropped off at the museum over the years. Without the provenance to show where they came from, Early said, it’s impossible to tell the stories of the people who crafted them.

How the public can help return 

Monteil noted that members of the public can help with NAGPRA simply by following state law. Two Arizona statutes require notifying the Arizona State Museum if any human remains or funerary objects are discovered on public or private land. And that’s where Monteil said the public’s assistance helps with the process.

Sometimes, she said, finding pottery shards of other smaller archaeological artifacts is an indicator that people are buried nearby. “It’s very helpful when state land officials and even private citizens report these disturbances or human remains, so that they can be properly protected or removed and returned to tribes,” she said.

Although some people consider halting construction or other human activities to reclaim Indigenous burials or other cultural patrimony as slowing down progress, Monteil said the community benefits from the process. "It preserves the value that these items bring culturally, not only to tribes, but to the foundation of the United States, because this is Indian Country,” she said. “It’s a way to protect the sacred culture items that are found in these sites.” Monteil said that people should not fear slowing down a project, so that consultation, documentation and mitigation can be conducted in a thoughtful way.

Lyons said that the legislation’s goal is to return these items to the most closely related community. It's not a perfect process – for example, the National Park Service noted in September 2018 that more than 122,000 human remains have yet to be returned to their homelands – but tribal cultural officials and museums agree that the statute has resulted in improved relationships and partnerships.

Both tribal citizens and museum professionals stressed that that the NAGPRA process means far more to Indigenous peoples than just bureaucracy.  

“It’s our responsibility to stand with the tribes and explain why ancestral peoples and objects belong with their descendants,” said Early.

“Repatriation is important because it’s a human rights issue,” said Lyons. “NAGPRA is human rights law; it reflects a moral imperative. Repatriation is the right thing to do.” 

And for Hopis, bringing home ancestral remains or sacred and cultural artifacts home is a time for rejoicing, said Koyiyumptewa. Sometimes, he said, “It could be rainfall or something else spectacular that happens."

“That's my experience with bringing cultural items home.”

Reach the reporter at debra.krol@AZCentral.com or at 602-444-8490. Follow her on Twitter at @debkrol. 

Coverage of tribal issues at the intersection of climate, culture and commerce is supported by the Catena Foundation and the Water Funder Initiative.

Support local journalism. Subscribe to azcentral.com today.