Chari, Sangita, and Jaime M.N. Lavallee, editors. ACCOMPLISHING NAGPRA: Perspectives on the Intent, Impact, and Future of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Oregon State University / Corvallis, 2013. 

Despain, Gabrielle. “A Look Into NAGPRA: Application, Issues, and the Future.” Wyoming Law Review, Wyoming Law Review, 2024, scholarship.law.uwyo.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1498&context=wlr. 

Ho, Karen K. “What the New Federal Regulations for Native American Ancestors and Sacred Objects Mean for Museums.” ARTnews.Com, ARTnews.com, 23 Feb. 2024, www.artnews.com/art-news/news/new-federal-regulations-native-american-ancestors-and-sacred-objects-natural-history-museum-1234696299/. 

Ho, Karen  K. “Federal Regulations Prompt Closure of Native American Displays at American Museum of Natural History.” ARTnews.Com, ARTnews.com, 26 Jan. 2024, www.artnews.com/art-news/news/federal-regulations-prompt-closure-native-american-displays-american-museum-of-natural-history-1234694404/. 

“Interior Department Announces Final Rule for Implementation of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.” U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Department of the Interior, 6 Dec. 2023, www.doi.gov/pressreleases/interior-department-announces-final-rule-implementation-native-american-graves. 

Interior Department. “Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act Systematic Processes for Disposition or Repatriation of Native American Human Remains, Funerary Objects, Sacred Objects, and Objects of Cultural Patrimony.” Federal Register, 13 Dec. 2023, www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/12/13/2023-27040/native-american-graves-protection-and-repatriation-act-systematic-processes-for-disposition-or. 

Jacobs, Julia, and Zachary Small. “Field Museum Covers Some Native Displays as New Rules Take Effect.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 11 Jan. 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/01/11/arts/design/field-museum-nagpra.html. 

Jacobs, Julia. “6 Objects That Explain New Rules on Native Displays in Museums.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 21 Feb. 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/02/21/arts/design/native-displays-museums-law.html. 

Jaffe, Logan, et al. “America’s Museums Fail to Return Native American Human Remains.” ProPublica, ProPublica, 11 Jan. 2023, www.propublica.org/article/repatriation-nagpra-museums-human-remains. 

“Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (U.S. National Park Service).” National Parks Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, www.nps.gov/subjects/nagpra/index.htm. 

“Native Art in Action.” Musuem of Natural and Cultural History, University of Oregon, 8 Nov. 2023, natural-history.uoregon.edu/exhibits/native-art-action. 

“Never Neutral: U.S. Museums Face Historical ‘Reckoning’: Columbian College of Arts & Sciences: The George Washington University.” Columbian College of Arts & Sciences, George Washington University, columbian.gwu.edu/never-neutral-us-museums-face-historical-reckoning. 

Hello and welcome to the Museum Files.

As always, I’m your host, Z Stevens. 

In this episode we’ll be discussing the evolution of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

We are going to be reviewing the contents of the law, as well as responses to its recent update by the Department of the Interior.

We will also be asking questions along the way.

What are some of the differences between the previous version and its update?

Why was an update needed? 

What does the current law do?

And why does the law exist? 

Answers to all those questions and more, in this episode of the Museum Files.

So what exactly are we talking about?

What is this law?

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, is a law passed in 1990 and updated by the Department of the Interior several times, most recently and drastically in 2023. 

As defined by the Department of the Interior, “The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of November 16[th], 1990, recognizes the rights of lineal descendants, Indian Tribes, and Native Hawaiian organizations in Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony.”

Patrimony is defined as ancestral property or heritage, which these remains and objects are a physical representation of.

The law was based on an earlier proposal meant to target large museums and other collecting institutions that received funding from the federal government, and had Indigenous Ancestral remains.

The law was created in the hopes of providing federal means for repatriation, and the return of Ancestors. 

While federal laws protecting gravesites existed, those protections did not extend to historical Indigenous burial sites.

The version of NAGPRA passed in 1990 was developed into a law that required the making of a list or catalog of any parts of the collection that fell into the following categories.

Ancestral remains; funerary, or burial, objects; objects of cultural significance, and objects of spiritual significance.

Basically, the same categories mentioned before. 

That catalog was to be made available to Federally recognized Tribes and Nations.  

We will get more into the definition of each of these categories later. 

The reports made by institutions are meant to provide the means for Tribes or Native groups to know what institutions to approach regarding reclaiming the remains of their ancestors or cultural histories. 

The reports, or summaries, should be sent to National NAGPRA, a division of the National Parks Service.

This law applies to federally funded collecting institutions, like museums, historical societies, colleges and universities, and government agencies. 

Government agencies are meant to follow a version of the law tailored to them, which we won’t be focusing on.

What is required in the summary has since changed with the 2023 update.

NAGPRA now requires that all objects or remains of Indigenous American origins must be reported in a summary to National NAGPRA.

Institutions must also give notice to National NAGPRA regarding requests for or intention of repatriation. 

Summaries must also be sent to recognized Tribes or organizations. 

For our purposes, we will be focusing on the regulation of funerary and culturally significant objects, which can be held in all sorts of institutions that have collections.

So let’s talk about definitions.

What do these terms mean to us? 

What are they based off of?

The definitions here are according to the updated NAGPRA text from the Department of the Interior on the website of the Federal Register.

Any definitions relating to objects themselves are as a rule according to the “Native American traditional knowledge of a lineal descendant, Indian Tribe, or Native Hawaiian organization (NHO).”

And, as a warning, this section is going to be very heavy in its use of long and complicated wording.

First, cultural items.

“​​Cultural items means a funerary object, sacred object, or object of cultural patrimony.”

Funerary objects.

“Funerary object means any object reasonably believed to have been placed intentionally with or near human remains. 

“A funerary object is any object connected, either at the time of death or later, to a death rite or ceremony of a Native American culture. 

“Funerary objects are either associated funerary objects or unassociated funerary objects.”

Associated funerary objects. 

“Associated funerary object means any funerary object related to human remains that were removed and the location of the human remains is known. 

“Any object made exclusively for burial purposes or to contain human remains is always an associated funerary object regardless of the physical location or existence of any related human remains”

An unassociated funerary object is a funerary object removed from its burial context or not found alongside remains.

Sacred objects.

“Sacred object means a specific ceremonial object needed by a traditional religious leader for present-day adherents to practice traditional Native American religion. 

“While many items might be imbued with sacredness in a culture, this term is specifically limited to an object needed for the observance or renewal of a Native American religious ceremony.”

Repatriation – that’s a term we’re going to be using a lot throughout this episode. 

“Repatriation means a museum or Federal agency relinquishes possession or control of human remains or cultural items in a holding or collection to a lineal descendant, Indian Tribe, or Native Hawaiian organization.”

Disposition. 

“Disposition means an appropriate official recognizes a lineal descendant, Indian Tribe, or Native Hawaiian organization has ownership or control of human remains or cultural items removed from Federal or Tribal lands.”

Often, a first step in repatriation is establishing the disposition of the remains or objects.

Before we go any further, I want to discuss my intentions with this episode. 

I am not trying to make any real policy proposals or legislation. 

I am trying to create a record of our immediate understanding and reactions to the 2023 update to NAGPRA. 

When it went into effect in January of 2024, a lot of headlines were made about the scrambling of museums around the country in response to the new rules. 

I want to document what those responses were, and discuss them in context with the history of the law. 

The history of NAGPRA is contentious, with some finding it to be an overreach of federal powers, and others finding it to not do enough.

I want to talk about how the update addresses some of those problems, and the responses to that. 

Especially responses that made national news. 

A lot of what we talk about will also be contextualized through the actions of the Smith College Museum of Art. 

How they responded, and what their actions going forward will look like. 

I would also like to be transparent about who I interviewed during the research portion of preparing for this episode. 

Everyone I talked to was affiliated with Smith College, as due to time constraints I was unable to have larger conversations with people outside of those immediately available to me. 

This means that there is a gap in perspectives represented in this podcast – no one I interviewed was of Indigenous descent, and neither am I. 

Instead, I was talking with outside scholars and museum affiliates. 

I hope to have bridged some of this gap through the scholarship I consulted, but I acknowledge that it isn’t the same thing. 

One of the goals of today’s episode is to help us better understand NAGPRA, and why its update created such a large reaction, so let’s talk about its history.

As we’ve established, NAGPRA was passed in 1990 as an edited version of an existing proposal targeting the Smithsonian Institute in hopes of repatriating the thousands of Ancestral remains it holds. 

It was also an expansion of legislation attempting to protect historical Indigenous burial places from unauthorized excavation and theft.

It was honestly seen as a good faith success of decades of lobbying by Indigenous activists.

It was a means of legal protection and recourse.

So what did it do?

It asked museums to create inventories of objects they had deemed as culturally sensitive.

Again, we’re going back to those earlier terms, because that means funerary objects, objects of cultural patrimony, and sacred objects.

But museums were allowed to define objects according to the expertise of whomever they had hired as a consultant.

That inventory was then submitted to National NAGPRA, while further distribution varied, it was usually on the museum to make sure that the appropriate Tribal authorities got copies 

While NAGPRA is overseen by the Interior Department, it is actually a part of the National Parks Service known as National NAGPRA.

Once a Tribal authority had reason to believe that they had found an object they wanted repatriated, the burden was on them to prove that they had the right to it.

Overall, the burden of the work for repatriation claims fell onto NAGPRA coordinators for Tribal authorities.

The work is often funded by grants from the Federal Government, who also gives grants to museums to complete the work on their ends.

Now that we know more about what NAGPRA detailed, let’s talk about why those changes were needed.

As a system of protection, NAGPRA was failing.

Only claims involving objects and remains that were proven to have importance through physical evidence to currently existing, federally recognized Tribes were moving forward.

Some museums and institutions have decided to categorize remains and objects as culturally unaffiliated, making it so that Tribes could not establish legal claims.

Others narrowed their definitions of cultural affiliation to the nearly unprovable in order to prevent claims from moving forward at all.

The Smithsonian Institution, despite being the target of some of the originating legislation, successfully lobbied to be made exempt from the legislation as a part of the The National Museum of the American Indian Act of 1996.

Other large institutions, like some overseen by the Interior Department itself, were outed as being the holders of more than half of the unrepatriated Ancestral remains in particular in a ProPublica investigation between 2022 and 2023. 

I actually highly recommend one article in particular for some historical background on how a lot of the NAGPRA sensitive objects and Ancestral remains ended up in museums and other institutions.

The article is called “America’s Biggest Museums Fail to Return Native American Human Remains” and is part of a larger investigation called the Repatriation Project. 

The reports were written by Logan Jaffe, Mary Hudetz, and Ash Ngu.  

To learn more about the failures of NAGPRA, I spoke with Christen Mucher, an Associate Professor of American Studies at Smith College.

According to the Professor, it was lobbying from larger institutions that changed how museums got to define who was related to what objects, and for museums to have to contact the appropriate peoples so that Tribal authorities wouldn’t necessarily know who was holding what. 

A flaw she pointed out in the original NAGPRA was that it also did not dedicate funding for resources. 

And as professor Mucher said,​​ it was designed in a way that slowed the repatriation process down.

What I took away from our conversation was that museums are the ones that need to be putting in the work to comply with NAGPRA.

They are the ones who have committed historical wrongs, and it is on them to begin the process of returning people’s heritage and Ancestral remains.

Allowing spirits to rest, and for pieces of cultural patrimony to return to their homes is by far one of the most important parts of responsible stewardship.

Onto the Update.

The update process started under the administration of Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Indigenous American to be the Secretary of the Interior, which oversees NAGPRA and other related federal agencies.

The proposed update had a comment period in 2022 and 2023 and the final edits were announced in December of 2023.

The updated regulations went into effect on the 12th of January, 2024.

Note the use of the term regulations – I’m using it because when we are referring to changes being made to the interpretation and enforcement of federal law, those changes are referred to as rules and regulations.

So what did the update do?

It clarified a lot of wordings, it updated definitions and timelines, and it did a few big things.

It put in place a five year timeline for the repatriation of Ancestral remains.

Any human remains identified as Native American must be repatriated to a lineal descendant or their associated Tribe or Nation, if that process is not already under way. 

Lineal descendant means a biological relative.

It created a need to receive documented permission to put Native American objects on view at museums, or for them to be researched, studied, or used for really any purposes.

It also updated which objects museums must report to national NAGPRA as being in their collection in order to remain compliant with the regulations.

While reported objects were originally what museums had deemed to be sacred objects, objects of cultural patrimony, or funerary objects, now it is any Indigenous American-made object.

The law focuses on historical objects with unnamed creators, and most museums have interpreted that as meaning works by contemporary Indigenous artists are not legally sensitive.

That report from the museums then gets sent to Federally recognized Tribes in order to aid with repatriation claims.

Also, there’s a new definition for how the objects should be cared for, aiming for good faith efforts to incorporate traditional showings of respect, asking museums to make contact with descendants/cultural communities, and obtaining consent as mentioned above.

There is also now a chance that Tribes outside of the currently existing, federally recognized criteria may see success with claims.

Also, as stated in the new definitions, objects of cultural significance are defined by Indigenous experts themselves, and not by outside academics.

The update also lays out the process to report NAGPRA violations and how the Interior Department will handle them.

Each violation is subject to its own fine at the discretion of the Interior Department, though no violation should garner a fine of more than ten thousand dollars.

Going back to Professor Mucher.

Regarding the update, Professor Mucher has been enjoying how dramatic some media responses are because it’s giving the public a taste of how unethical the display of spiritual/cultural artifacts and Ancestral remains is. 

She reiterated that members of the public don’t need to see those things, even as patrons of cultural institutions like museums.

The media outcry around new restrictions in the update, which we will get to in a minute, just demonstrates an inability to understand – as well as a lack of desire from the authors of the articles to understand the spirit of the law when they use images and sensationalize the updates.

In Professor Mucher’s opinion, the outrage is largely non-native, meaning that the outcry is not actually coming from the people who’s culture’s are most impacted by the law.

In terms of how the update came about, Professor Mucher told me that Secretary Haaland led people to anticipate these changes because of new attention to Native American requests.

Also, it took 34 years for a significant change to be made to the legislation, so it was never going to be out of nowhere.

There was also a comment period made for the public.

Professor Mucher said that the perception of the quickness came from the official passing to enaction and that the alarmist reports sensationalizing the common practice of removing objects from view as needed was a part of that alarm.

After all, many museums were already seeking permission to display Indigenous made objects.

She noted that the American Museum of Natural History has been a longstanding holdout to NAGPRA compliance, and that putting a five year timeline on them might help kickstart their repatriations.

Professor Mucher also pointed out that a lot of museums have legacy collections – pieces collected throughout their long histories.

Those older institutions often don’t know what they have – as a lot of their pieces are accessible in storage.

She hopes that the Update will help them start a review of their collections.

I also asked if  there were parts of the update that she thinks are especially strong, or any that are weak. 

She told me that there were gaps in places that don’t receive federal funding, like local historical societies and libraries.

While they aren’t included, many have legacy collections of their own with human remains in their storage and collections.

She has heard of institutions that want to repatriate but don’t know how to start, as they are afraid of political repercussions and lack guidance.

In regards to whether complying with the Update will be harder on Tribal Nations, Professor Mucher said yes, but that the update will establish a window for repatriation, especially for non-federally recognized Tribes, which she believes will be considered progress. 

That’s the whole point of the update: progress.

Responses to the update looked different in different museums and media outlets.

We’re going to use some media coverage to explore that.

Specifically, a national outlet in the form  of the New York Times.

And a more specialist outlet in the form of ARTnews.

The two New York Times articles I want to talk about are from January and February of 2024, respectively.

The first is “Field Museum Covers Some Native Displays as New Rules Take Effect.”

And the second is “6 Objects That Explain New Rules on Native Displays in Museums.”

Both are by the reporter Julia Jacobs, and the first is coauthored by Zachary Small.

Both articles use pretty inflammatory language, describing museums as scrambling, and focusing on potential budget worries.

The language used in the first article especially focuses more on a perceived hardship shifted to museums, and not the potential victory for Indigenous American groups and their supporters.

That kind of alarmist language felt very much the norm in a lot of the early reporting about the update to the regulations.

Like museums and their visitors would suffer because of protections perceived to be overreaching.

I want to stay with the second article for a second. 

The “Six Objects,” one.

I’m actually going to advise people not to seek it out, because I want to propose that this article is actually going against the spirit of the law.

The author here, Jacobs, is very much taking images of these objects and their information from museums holding them without permission and using them in a perceived educational context.

While the use of examples to explain concepts like funerary and culturally sensitive objects is normally a great idea, taking actual objects being removed from public access for those reasons to do so is not such a great idea.

It feels disrespectful to the Tribes who may be missing these objects or in the process of making repatriation claims for them.

It also feels willfully ignorant.

Explaining why objects are coming off of view is a good thing to do, but actually pointing out those objects to do so is counterproductive.

Meanwhile, the more industry based ARTNews started by pointing out that the updated regulations reflected new industry standards.

Both of my sample articles were written by journalist Karen Ho, and her January article, “Federal Regulations Prompt Closure of Native American Displays at American Museum of Natural History” and February article, “What the New Federal Regulations for Native American Ancestors and Sacred Objects Mean for Museums” both have a different tone than Jacobs’ New York Times articles.

While Ho does use a few sample photographs of displays of indigenous objects in some of the museums she is investigating, it is at least noted that they are from prior to the update.

It’s the small victories.

They also include more quotes and interviews with indigenous people themselves.

I would argue that while Ho’s articles are imperfect, they do a better job of reflecting the actual victory of the update, and show that the NAGPRA discussion in museums and art spaces was already beyond what the public was paying attention to.

As all museums which receive Federal funding, which is most of them must submit summaries of their holdings of Native American objects in order to stay in compliance with NAGPRA, that includes the Smith College Museum of Art, or SCMA for short.

To talk more about NAGPRA related practices at SCMA, I spoke with Robyn Haynie, the Collections Manager and Registrar.

For transparency’s sake, I will also disclose here that Robyn has been my direct supervisor at work for the last academic year, because I am also an employee of SCMA.

Interview transcript: 

[ZS = Z Stevens & RH: Robyn Haynie]

ZS: So what is your name, your position, and some of your professional background?

RH: My name is Robyn Haynie, I am the Collections Manager Registrar for the Smith College Museum of Art. 

RH: I came to Collections Management and Registration actually through formal training in objects conservation – three dimensional objects. 

RH: And that’s because prior to going to graduate school I’d worked in a lot of archaeological collections and dealing with a lot of archaeological and anthropological material. 

RH: After grad school I worked for several academic art museums, including most recently at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, which had significant holdings of Native American and Spanish colonial material, where I was Head of Collections, and did a fair amount of NAGPRA related work.

RH: The Smith College Museum of Art has periodically worked on NAGPRA.

RH: They did a lot of work in the nineties, they were in contact with Tribes in the early 2000s, and as recently as 2018 they had had a scholar come in and look at their collection of Native American holdings to try to determine what might be subject to NAGPRA laws, since NAGPRA initially governed only material that is sacred, ceremonial, or objects of cultural patrimony.

RH: So most of the assessments done up to 2018, and including 2018, indicated that we didn’t really hold much that is probably susceptible to these regulations.

RH: After I started I kind of went through some of that materials trying to get a handle on where we were and what was happening.

RH: I came across some correspondence from 2016 and I also, having had previous experience with NAGPRA, searched the Federal Database which records what organizations have done in terms of NAGPRA summaries and inventories and we weren’t listed in that database which indicated to me that we’d never actually submitted any documentation to National NAGPRA; to the Park Service, which is a requirement of the law.

RH: I figured out pretty quickly that we were not where we should be in terms of compliance, and so started collaborating with our curatorial partners to think about doing an entirely new summary to distribute to Tribes and to National NAGPRA.

RH: And I felt that a new summary was the right way to go since it had been so long since the nineties, and we’ve acquired a number of items since then.

RH: It seemed like a good time to just get a fresh start out there.

ZS: And since you say a number of objects, but you previously mentioned a very small amount being potentially susceptible to NAGPRA, do you mean that your new summary was going to include all of the Native American holdings within the museum?
RH: Yes. 

RH: The way I have been trained, was that it was more within the spirit and the ethics of the law to just send out a list of everything that you held, even though there are bound to be many, many items that are not subject to the law or necessarily repatriable, they might be of interest to the Tribes. 

RH: It’s just kind of acting in good faith to submit all materials.

RH: Especially for us, we only have three hundred and fifty-ish objects, so it’s not like this overwhelming list of 30,000 objects that they’d have to comb  through.

RH: It made sense in my brain to just send out the whole list.

RH: my understanding of people who were working on this when the law was implemented in the ‘90s, the goal was really to try to create relationships between Tribal organizations and museums.

RH: To kind of develop these ties so that museums and Tribes could open channels of communication and continually check in on collecting and collection practices.

RH: I think that anytime you try to put anything like that, an ideal like that, into a legislative process it’s tricky.

RH: And I think… not every organization has fully bought in to that collaborative spirit, and there were people who were at least initially wary of something that opens them up to losing a significant portion of their holdings.

RH: I have to say, I even encountered that perspective as recently as, you know, 2019, 2020, where I’d had members of the community at the last place I worked who came to me with concerns that we were going to begin to be giving everything away.

RH: So it really became then a conversation about what NAGPRA is, what it means to steward material, and also, the fact that these materials wouldn’t be available for display or research anyway.

RH: So trying to talk through what that loss means and why the law is really important and why these materials should go back.

ZS: I was wondering, you know, do you have any thoughts on how the update was announced?

RH: I think the update was coming, and people have known that it was coming for quite a while.

RH: So you know, we didn’t necessarily know all the details, but it wasn’t as though this came out of nowhere .

RH: But I think that maybe the scope of the update maybe caught people off guard? 

ZS: Do you have any thoughts on the update and what maybe came with it?

RH: So I think that the update really is a response to how NAGPRA has rolled out over the past thirty years.

RH: Which is slowly and painfully.

RH: I think it’s designed to really motivate museums to get the work done that they should have been doing for the past thirty years.

RH: And I say that knowing full well that NAGPRA work is time intensive and that it is often expensive and there’s a lot that goes into it, and a lot of expertise needed.

RH: But I think that the goal of the update is really to make people prioritize it in a way that should have been done originally.

ZS: So do you feel like you have any sort of interpretations of the update that differ from what you’re seeing discussed?

RH: Yeah, so I think we are trying to err on the side of caution here at the Smith College Museum of Art, though I will say I have heard of colleagues who have effectively let the update determine that they are almost shutting down all of their Native American collections.

RH: So they’re not using them for display, they’re not accessing them for research, and they’re just kind of putting everything on pause.

RH: So we’re not quite going that far, contemporary work and work by Native artists, we are still utilizing for display and using to talk to students.

RH: So it’s really our historic material or our materials of unknown makers or limited provenance that we’re taking off view and restricting access while we work through consultations.

ZS: And can I ask why we’re, as a museum, keeping named artists, their works on view?

RH: I think for the most part, after conversations with curatorial colleagues, most of the artists that we hold are recognized artists who are practicing as artists, so it doesn’t feel out of line. 

RH: It seems unlikely that these would be objects that are NAGPRA sensitive; sacred, ceremonial, or objects of cultural patrimony.

RH: So they feel like they wouldn’t be subject to the new regulations.

RH: It is interpretation, right, it was a decision that we made amongst museum staff.

ZS: How is your work interacting with the update, I mean, you’re not putting out historical materials anymore, and it’s not being pulled for research, what does that mean, sort of, for what you do? 

RH: So to be honest, we didn’t have much on view before.

RH: The update sort of affected one object on view, that had been installed, and three works that had planned to be installed in our third floor reinstallation.

RH: Since I’ve been here at Smith, which isn’t that long, I started in January of 2023, we haven’t really pulled much of this material for class use.

RH: So the immediate impact was relatively limited.

RH: However, it does place some urgency on the process that had already gotten started in terms of making the new summary and trying to get consultations established.

ZS: How is that process of getting consultations going, has that started?

RH: No.

RH: We haven’t sent out any letters yet, so our summary is just about ready to go, we’ve got a draft letter, so we have to get that out in the next few weeks.

RH: And then, this might be pessimistic, I don’t expect that we will be inundated with responses to our summary.

RH: Both because we don’t think we hold much materials that are NAGPRA sensitive, but also because the focus of the new regulations is really placing emphasis on addressing human remains, and we don’t hold any human remains in our collection here.

End of interview

Something important Christen Mucher noted was that SCMA has historically lacked expertise around NAGPRA.

It has also had a lack of dedication to integrated approaches.

And as a college Smith often ends up with sketchy gifts and legacy objects, though there is now more vetting of such gifts and a more extensive inventory is being done of the legacy collection.

SCMA has removed any objects potentially sensitive to NAGPRA from view and removed access to them in educational settings.

They, like many other museums, are keeping works by named contemporary artists on view, as it is their current interpretation of NAGPRA that works created as art objects are not subject to the law.

They are beginning the long overdue process of sending out their inventory to Tribal authorities and National NAGPRA as well.

Moving forward, it must be acknowledged that museum visitors do not necessarily have the right to view the sacred artifacts of other cultures, especially those who did not intend to share them.

The fact the Tribes may now determine what is and isn’t NAGPRA sensitive is a step in the right direction, but it is still on museums to make sure that repatriations happen respectfully and with no undue burden to the claimant.

The version of NAGPRA  passed in 1990, while mostly well intentioned, was deeply flawed and very easy to take advantage of.

While the recent update is by far a more effective interpretation of the legislation, it could always be better.

And, the stakes regarding compliance should be higher for large institutions, who are often the biggest offenders, the fines are like a slap on the wrist right now.

The Smithsonian Institution is still not required to be compliant with NAGPRA, and must be, just like any other federal institution.

And for some personal reflections, it is my personal belief that the culture around how people view cultural artifacts must change.

It is not the right of any person or institution to own pieces of another culture’s material heritage.

Let alone the remains of the ancestors.

Many cultural objects are not created for display or to be on view to the public, and that needs to be respected – they were not intentionally art objects.

I mean this in the most respectful way possible, it is not the right of the public to have access to sacred parts of other cultures just because we want to see them.

Finally, all objects that are requested with a legitimate claim for repatriation must be returned under law.

It is my hope that what we have talked about here can serve as a form of documentation of the early days of understanding the updated NAGPRA, and how people are working within its ruling. 

I’m sure things will be changing as the law is further interpreted or further understood, but as of April of 2024, this is sort of the basics of what we know and how we’re reacting. 

Thank you for listening to the Museum Files, with me, your host, Z Stevens.

Today’s episode was brought to you in association with Smith College, the Smith College Museum of Art, and the Museum Concentration. 

My thanks to Jessica Nicoll, Charlene Shang Miller, Robyn Haine, Danielle Carrabino, Christen Mucher, Daina Leihbson, the Smith College ITS Department, and the cohort of the 2024 concentration capstone. 

As always, thanks for listening, and please remember to respect the world and the people around you.