This May, the Federal Register published repatriation notices from four of the most powerful cultural institutions in the United States: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard, and the Museum of Us in San Diego.
The objects involved range from a sandstone funerary figure to sacred leather bags and their contents and dozens of funerary objects.
NAGPRA [Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act] has been the primary legal mechanism for returning Indigenous ancestral remains and sacred objects held in US museum collections since 1990.
Its 2024 amendments were significant: the burden of proof was shifted from tribes to institutions, the category of “culturally unidentifiable remains” was eliminated, and oral tradition was formally recognised as sufficient evidence of cultural affiliation. These are genuine reforms.
And yet, as of 2023 — the most recent systematic accounting — only 48% of reported human remains subject to NAGPRA had been returned. After thirty-five years, the law’s most consequential limitation has never been addressed: it stops at the property line, as NAGPRA does not cover private landowners.
