Imprisoned ancestors or museum pieces? NAGPRA and American museums.

Abstract

This introductory text presents a set of circumstances and actions which led to the enactment, in 1990, of Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and the process of implementing this federal law.

It summarizes the history of treatment of Native American artefacts, which led to protests organized by indigenous groups and organizations defending the rights of native people to protect the skeletal remains of their ancestors, and objects of their cultures. Those actions eventually resulted in the approval of the law - NAGPRA.

To comply with NAGPRA museums, organizations or collections, which receive any type of federal funding, are obligated to create inventories of their tribal collections, especially lists of human remains, and return them to owners for proper burial. NAGPRA covers not only human remains but also religious objects and other objects with attributed great cultural value, which also must be returned to tribes if requested. For the last 30 years, museums were rather slow in their response to the law. Many artefacts, protected under NAGPRA, were still exhibited in the collections across the USA. That prompt Secretary of Interior of the Biden administration to append the law in January 2023.The goal is to speed up the process of complying with NAGPRA. New rules set stricter deadlines and give more authority to tribal experts in the process of evaluating the meaning, provenience and value of the objects. Now, museums are obligated to finish their inventories before 2029. New rules resulted in closing many public exhibitions and in changing ways of cooperation between tribal groups and museum’s practice.