The Slow Death of Archaeology in the Name of ‘Repatriation’

What began as a respectful process of return has devolved into the wholesale destruction of archaeological knowledge.

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About the Author

Elizabeth Weiss is a professor emeritus of anthropology at San José State University and the author of On the Warpath: My Battles with Indians, Pretendians, and Woke Warriors.

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Nearly thirty-five years ago the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA)—which requires universities, museums, and other federally funded institutions to provide inventories of the Native American human remains being curated—was passed.

The purpose of NAGPRA was to enable present-day federally recognized Native American tribes to repatriate—and, if they chose, rebury—human remains deemed “culturally affiliated.” According to the original Senate Report, “cultural affiliation” was to be “established by a simple preponderance of the evidence.” Acceptable forms of evidence included “geographical, kinship, biological, archaeological, anthropological, linguistic, oral tradition, or historical evidence or other relevant information or expert opinion.”

In addition to human remains, three categories of culturally affiliated materials must also be repatriated and therefore included in institutional inventories submitted to the NAGPRA office. These are funerary objects, which are “objects that, as a part of the death rite or ceremony of a culture, are reasonably believed to have been placed with individual human remains either at the time of death or later”; sacred objects, defined as “specific ceremonial objects…needed by traditional Native American religious leaders for the practice of traditional Native American religions by their present day adherents”; and objects of cultural patrimony, or objects that have “ongoing historical, traditional, or cultural importance central to the Native American group or culture itself, rather than property owned by an individual Native American.”

By 2020, according to NAGPRA’s 2022 fiscal year report to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), 92 percent of culturally affiliated human remains had been repatriated, along with 2.1 million funerary objects. Yet as the 35th anniversary of the law approaches, there will likely be a wave of media stories criticizing universities and museums for failing to return remains and artifacts back to Native American tribes. Millions of artifacts, they’ll claim, are still stored away in curation facilities; thousands of “ancestors,” they’ll claim, are being held hostage in storage rooms. How do I know? Because it has happened many times before, including reports on Fresno State University’s alleged 38,700 artifacts, articles on the Arizona State Museum’s 2,700 human remains and 14,000 artifacts, and a national report claiming that 4.5 million sacred objects are still being held.

At first glance, it appears that this may be the case; after all, in NAGPRA’s 2024 fiscal year report to the GAO, the claim is that only “58% …of the Native American human remains reported have completed the NAGPRA process.” What happened to the 92 percent? The answer is that the 2024 figure does not distinguish between culturally affiliated and unaffiliated remains. Yet, NAGPRA’s intent was to return human remains to culturally affiliated tribes, not to “repatriate” all Native American remains. Repatriate to whom?

In 2023, the “final rule” regulations did not change the law itself but revised the guidance, effectively lowering the threshold for establishing cultural affiliation. The new guidance states “these regulations require deference to the Native American traditional knowledge of lineal descendants, Indian Tribes, and Native Hawaiian organizations.” Notably, the term “Native American traditional knowledge”—which conflates religious beliefs with empirical knowledge—was newly introduced and did not appear in the original statute. In short, the goalposts have been moved.