Hundreds are held in Nevada institutions, including the Nevada State Museum.
Two-hundred federally funded institutions with remains have not repatriated at all.
Raised in Fallon, Josh Bonde, a palaeontologist by profession and a member of the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone, is the first Indigenous director of a museum that has, like many institutions, found itself forced to address past practices used by archaeologists and anthropologists.
Today, hundreds of ancestral remains and funerary objects have still not been returned to the Indigenous peoples of the Great Basin under decades-old federal and state laws. Repatriation to tribes can be a frustratingly delayed process.
This is not only the fault of institutions where the ancestral remains are stored. Museums and universities often curate ancestral remains on behalf of federal agencies: the Bureau of Land Management, the Navy or the Bureau of Reclamation.
Those agencies have the responsibility to conduct consultation and initiate repatriation. At the same time, many agencies are under-resourced, often lacking any dedicated staff to focus on NAGPRA.
Tribal governments are sovereign nations and leaders stress that consultation must be substantive, that consultation is a requirement that cannot be done by only sending a letter.
