Anisa Khalifa: For over a century, Western archeologists looted the graves of Indigenous people in the name of science and history. They built vast collections of artifacts and human remains, most of which are still kept in universities, museums and private collections around the world. For many Native Americans today, like Shana Bushyhead Condill, a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians based in North Carolina, those violations have left a painful legacy.
Shana Bushyhead Condill: And so thinking about, you know, the ancestors that have had their journey disrupted, and are many times in boxes and basements of institutions, it's — that's hard to just comprehend on a human level.
Anisa Khalifa: For communities like Shana's, a glimmer of hope appeared in 1990, with the passage of a federal law intended to facilitate the return of Native American ancestors to their tribes. But 30 years later, tens of thousands of remains and funerary artifacts are still held at institutions around the country. I'm Anisa Khalifa. This week on The Broadside: the difficult, long-delayed process of Native American repatriation, and how tribes and institutions are working to solve the problem.
The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, has been under intense scrutiny this year. Recently, Laura Pellicer reported on it for North Carolina public radio along with colleagues at Blue Ridge Public Radio. Together, they explored the complicated issues surrounding the law, particularly in the south.
Laura Pellicer: So NAGPRA was passed in 1990. And it was the result of decades of activism from Native Americans who had been fighting against the looting of burial mounds and grave sites that have been happening for decades, or longer, by amateur and professional archaeologists. And folks wanted to see the return of their ancestors.
And then this year ProPublica published this investigation that they called the Repatriation Project, and they took a look at, you know, how much progress has actually been made in the 33 years since NAGPRA passed. And they took all of these bits of federal data that were kind of a hodgepodge. You know, they were available in like PDF forms and text documents and spreadsheets. And they put it all together in this really accessible data visualization so that journalists across the country could look at their own states and their own regions and have a better sense of, okay, how many Native American remains have actually been returned since NAGPRA passed?
And so I think that investigation really did fuel a lot of the momentum. And I will say, I think there's a couple other factors behind that interest. One is that we have the first ever Native American Cabinet Secretary, Deb Holland. She's a member of the Pueblo of Laguna, and she heads the US Department of the Interior, which has control or oversight over NAGPRA. And then I think another factor is that there is this conversation that we see happening, kind of around the world right now around looted artifacts that have been sitting in museums,
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Unidentified Anchor: Museums around the world are returning artifacts to their countries of origin, one in London, has sent back its entire collection of Benin bronzes to Nigeria's government. It's one example of a trend of historic items being returned from across Europe, the Middle East and the Americas.
Laura Pellicer: And there is more momentum around returning these items to the communities where they originally came from.
Anisa Khalifa: So let's dig into this law a little bit more. What does this law say? And who does it apply to?
Laura Pellicer: The goal of NAGPRA was to make it easier for Native American tribes to reclaim the physical remains of their ancestors, along with any funeral related artifacts that were sort of buried at the same time as their ancestors. So another part of NAGPRA is that it also helps protect Native American burial grounds from looting, and NAGPRA applies to any institution that receives federal funds. All those institutions need to comply with NAGPRA. So as you can imagine, that means you know, federal agencies, museums, universities, state agencies, all the way down to like local city governments that may receive federal funding. Everyone needs to comply, and NAGPRA applies to human remains and funerary artifacts that are linked to federally recognized tribes only, there's a couple of lines in there for non-federally recognized tribes. But there isn't a lot of meat that protects state-recognized tribes.
Anisa Khalifa: One thing that I noticed you bring up in your story is the idea of cultural affiliation. How is that defined for the purposes of repatriation?
Laura Pellicer: Cultural affiliation is this idea that the remains or the artifacts can be traced back in time, to a tribe that is federally recognized today. That does, of course, pose some problems in North Carolina, where we have one federally recognized tribe, and many state recognized tribes. But so the idea is that researchers are supposed to look at all of the available information, we're talking oral traditions, it can be written documentation, anything that might link communities to the land where those remains, those human remains, or those funerary artifacts were removed. And I spoke with Miranda Panther. She's the NAGPRA officer for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, Tribal Historic Preservation Office. And she said that it shouldn't really be the responsibility for institutions to determine cultural affiliation.
Miranda Panther: I think it's important to keep that conversation going, I don't look at tribal consultation as a one and done thing. It should be something that is consistent and ongoing. So it should be that they have an open channel to tribes that have Aboriginal territory in North Carolina.
Anisa Khalifa: How many Indigenous remains are still being held by these institutions, and how many have been returned since NAGPRA was passed?
Laura Pellicer: So in North Carolina, we're looking at 1200 of these human remains that are held in collections right now. Only 500 of them have been repatriated since 1990. And the rate of repatriation in North Carolina that struck me when I looked at the data, because less than 30%, of ancestral remains held in institutions across North Carolina, have been made available for a turn to tribes. And that is significantly lower than around 50%, across the country. So that that rate kind of stood out to me.
Anisa Khalifa: Why is that? And you know, what are the institutions kind of — how can they justify that?
Laura Pellicer: Right, so, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, their research laboratories of archaeology, they hold the largest collection of unrepatriated remains in the state. So they have more than 600 Native Americans who have not been made available for return to tribes. And I spoke with the head of the labs, her name is Margaret Scarry. And she told me that all of those 600-plus remains are considered culturally unaffiliated. So, you know, we talked earlier about affiliation, and the concept of being able to link remains to present day federally recognized tribes. And she's saying that these domains are difficult to map to modern-day tribes. And she says it's not always a simple matter to do that kind of linking.
Margaret Scarry: Affiliation is a really complicated issue, especially when you're dealing with ancestral remains that may be 1000s of years old. And also, Native people and communities moved around in the past, not just you know, some communities moved on sort of on a regular basis, but tribes relocated both before and after the colonists arrived. And it's not always a simple matter to map archaeological sites on to modern times.
Laura Pellicer: I will mention that institutions aren't required to initiate the repatriation of remains that are deemed to be culturally unaffiliated. And instead, it's really up to tribes to reach out to institutions, and that process of reaching out, that requires money and time and resources. And according to ProPublica, the fact that the onus is on tribes and not really on institutions, is a bit of a loophole. The fact that institutions can mark remains as culturally unaffiliated to this degree is a loophole. I also spoke with the manager for the national NAGPRA program, Melanie O'Brien, and I asked her to take a look at UNC's federal filings and give me a sense of, you know, whether there was more that I wasn't seeing, and she sent me all the inventory lists and sent me the federal filings from UNC. And then she told me that it doesn't seem that UNC has done a lot of work to allow repatriation of the ancestors in their inventory.
Anisa Khalifa: So this is one of those areas, perhaps, that you mentioned, that the law doesn't necessarily have maybe the teeth that would prompt these institutions to make these efforts.
Laura Pellicer: Yeah, exactly. You know, it's a law that was put in place in 1990. It's had some updates over the years. But ultimately, folks that I spoke with — multiple folks that I spoke with said it doesn't have the sort of robust consequences that would be needed for institutions like UNC, to expedite the return of remains. So yeah, that's exactly it. It doesn't quite have the teeth.
Anisa Khalifa: For those that are able to repatriate their ancestors. What is the process, exactly? I know you spoke, you mentioned that you spoke to Miranda Panther. Was she able to give you some details about what that looks like?
Laura Pellicer: Yeah. So Miranda Panther was able to really walk me through step by step through what it means to repatriate human Native American remains. And she said, first of all, that it's a really lengthy process. It requires a lot of patience, and a lot of organization skills. The shortest amount of time that she sees for having remains returned to her community or returned to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, is about a year. And that's really when everything goes well in the repatriation project process. It can take years and years and years. So that is as short as it gets. It starts out in a few different ways, you know, it can start out with a tribe making a claim for repatriation of remains, or an institution reaching out to a tribe. Sometimes, sometimes during a construction project, you know, folks may encounter the remains of Native Americans, which triggers the NAGPRA process. And from there, it's sort of a lot of back and forth to, you know, reaffirm that it is indeed remains associated with that tribe. And then she said that the ultimate goal of all of this for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians is reburial; the community takes back the remains, and they re-bury them in a private ceremony. They don't reveal a lot of details about that ceremony, because they are trying to protect those remains from being looted, or disturbed, again.
Miranda Panther: It's a very somber and respectful burial that's going on for the community at large. Even though some of the ancestors that we're burying might be 10,000 years old, or a couple hundred years old, they're still Cherokee, they're still a person, and I feel really strongly about it being a human rights issue. And, you know, not only did they not ask to be disturbed, and I'm sure had no expectation that something like that would ever happen, and that their graves would be looted and disrespected. But we want to make sure and try and right that wrong as best as we can, and get them back to them being at peace. It's a very honorable job that we have, and so we all take that very seriously.
Anisa Khalifa: We'll be right back after this break.
Earlier we chatted with Laura Pellicer, who reported on how NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, falls short. But in order to understand the issues surrounding repatriation, you really have to understand the history of archaeology and America. And for that, we turn to a journalist based in western North Carolina.
Lilly Knoepp: Hi, I'm Lily Knoepp. I'm the Senior Regional Reporter with Blue Ridge Public Radio.
Anisa Khalifa: For years, Lilly has covered Native American issues extensively where she lives, which includes the home of the only federally recognized tribe in North Carolina.
Lilly Knoepp: One of the big things that I hear from the Eastern Band of Cherokee every time we interview them to talk about culture, is just that culture is not a static thing. It's not something that is just in the past. There's a lot happening in the Indigenous communities across this country.
Anisa Khalifa: Lilly says that in the past few decades, there's been a noticeable shift in the way museums and archaeologists handle Indigenous artifacts and remains. Many tribal museums and Native American curators are leading that conversation.
Lilly Knoepp: The way that archaeology has functioned in the United States has changed a lot. And I've learned this through interviewing archaeologists and history professors here in Western North Carolina who study the region. There used to be this sort of just mentality to collect as much as possible. And we talked about this a lot with Shana Bushyhead Condilll, the executive director of the Museum of the Cherokee.
Shana Bushyhead Condill: At the same time that they were collecting, they were also in a race to collect before Native groups disappeared, died out. When I say race, I mean, like people, the the amount of collections that that people had, from the 19th century into the 20th century are just like, crazy. Vast collections. The National Museum of American Indian, most of that collection comes from George Gustav High, and it was —- he had close to a million objects.
Lilly Knoepp: You know, she's really trying to think about their museum, not so much as a place to explain their history to tourists who come to town, and change it into a place where the community can learn about their culture. And I think that's really representative of the way that we are, you know, thinking about history now, and the way that these archaeologists are talking about history, and working with the people whose history they're preserving and whose stories they are telling to make sure that they're included in that storytelling and making those decisions.
Anisa Khalifa: When you spoke to Shana, what was her perspective on the long delay in repatriating native ancestors?
Lilly Knoepp: You know, she appreciated the work that's been done by these institutions to get these back. But I think there is a need for a lot more urgency.
Shana Bushyhead Condill: The general consensus is that, you know, the passing of NAGPRA was important. It was you know, a political statement. But there were no teeth to the law. So there are no repercussions if you don't comply. And so for Native communities that are really working hard to to rediscover language and cultural traditions that were forcibly removed from them, be it laws that were passed, be at boarding school, then for us, it's really hard to understand when institutions dig in their heels and want to keep our ancestors, or keep our objects of cultural patrimony.
Lilly Knoepp: These are her ancestors. And this is a really painful and personal thing to be a part of. And so, you know, why has it taken this long to get those back?
Anisa Khalifa: There is a hopeful part to this story. According to Lilly's co-reporter, Laura Pellicer, NAGPRA is expected to be updated or changed soon.
Laura Pellicer: Right. So we have for the first time, a Native American woman who is heading the US Department of the Interior. And under her leadership, we are supposed to see new NAGPRA regulations by the end of this calendar year. A federal officer with the NAGPRA office confirmed that that is their goal. And the new rules are expected to do a few things. They're expected to help facilitate and speed up the return of ancestral remains. They're also gonna make it a little bit easier for institutions to associate those remains to Native American communities. So it will kind of facilitate that process that we talked about that's been a real hurdle. And it's also going to strengthen the authority of Native American tribes in the repatriation process, because they haven't felt that they have had enough control over the whole process of NAGPRA. And, you know, in the end, those are the remains of their ancestors that are still being held in institutions.
Anisa Khalifa: Yeah. Do the tribes and government officials involved believe that these changes might actually make a difference?
Laura Pellicer: Yeah, it's interesting. Miranda Panther, the NAGPRA officer for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Tribal Historic Preservation Office, told me that she is hopeful.
Miranda Panther: I definitely hope that, you know, the burden won't be on tribes as it has been in the past, for us to really seek out these places and people who were responsible for NAGPRA collections at all the institutions and agencies across the country, that they're going to be more proactive about reaching out to tribes and that they're going to see that it's not a difficult process. We just want to make sure and have that dialogue and it be respectful, and that people who are employed by institutions are able to see, like why it means so much to tribes to get their people back, and to get their objects back, because I haven't really had a voice in saying, you know, what that looks like or what is going to be done to these collections. So I'm hoping that I can work myself out of the job in the next, you know, 10 or 20 years, but hopefully wrapping up domestic NAGPRA, and my next goal is international repatriation.
Anisa Khalifa: If you want to check out more reporting from Laura Pellicer and Blue Ridge Public Radio's Lilly Knoepp on this topic, we've dropped a link in this week's show description. You'll also find a link to the repatriation project from ProPublica. This episode of the Broadside was produced by me, Anisa Khalifa, and edited by Jerad Walker. The Broadside is a production of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. Find us on your favorite podcast app and on wunc.org. If you enjoyed the show, leave us a rating, a review, or tell a friend to tell a friend. Thanks for listening, y'all. We'll be back next week.