Unwinding Non-Native Control over Native America's Past: A Statistical Analysis of the Decisions to Return Native American Human Remains and Funerary Objects under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, 1992–2013
71 Pages Posted: 21 Sep 2016
Date Written: September 16, 2016
Abstract
The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA or the Act), which notched its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2015, is one of the most important human rights laws in the United States. The hard-fought legislation enshrines the fundamental right of Native Americans to control their ancestral dead, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony. Its 1990 enactment initiated an abrupt break from the prior emphasis on preserving human remains and cultural items for scientific study, requiring federal agencies and museums to: review their collections; consult Native people; and repatriate culturally affiliated remains as well as their associated funerary objects.
As demonstrated by the return of the “Kennewick Man” case to national headlines, NAGPRA and the repatriation of Native American human remains, particularly ancient remains, continue to be controversial. Given this ongoing tension and NAGPRA’s quarter-century of implementation, the time is ripe to examine the federal agency and museum repatriation decisions and assess the Act’s effectiveness. This paper attempts to do so by collecting and synthesizing baseline cultural affiliation data, identifying patterns, evaluating compliance, addressing criticisms, and analyzing the decision-making institutions’ choices as well as interactions with Native Americans. The result is the first comprehensive statistical analysis of federal agency and museum decisions to transfer human remains and funerary objects to Native Americans.
In its concluding remarks, this paper proposes using the evidence type, chronology, and provenance data from the published repatriation decisions to reassess the status of the culturally unidentifiable remains still held in collections, which agencies and museums initially determined were not related to present-day Native Americans. This paper argues that comparing temporal and geographic information from the culturally affiliated human remains with similar data from culturally unidentifiable remains will assist agencies and museums identify prospective Native consultants. Engaging these consultants in conjunction with the corresponding affiliation decision evidence might switch many of the unidentifiable remains in collections to affiliated status and clear a path for their repatriation or at least provide sufficient evidence for their disposition under NAGPRA despite not meeting the cultural affiliation standard.
Keywords: Native American, NAGPRA, Indian Law, Kennewick Man, Ancient One, Archaeology, Archeology, Anthropology, Native American Law, Repatriation, Cultural Resource Management, Human Rights, Reburial, Statistics, Statistical Analysis, Colonialism
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