Cronkite News: Ancestors: The Journey Home
Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to return ancestors and artifacts to their rightful places but compliance remains spotty 25 years later. According to the NAGPRA program's fiscal year 2014 final report, more than 16,000 ancestors have been repatriated since 1990. That leaves more than 163,000 in the collections of museums, federal agencies and other institutions. “When NAGPRA was enacted, it was really an attempt to right some wrongs,” Manley Begay Jr., the director of the Native Nations Institute for Leadership Management at the University of Arizona, told Cronkite News. “However only some museums and only a few individuals have really adhered to the intent – the legal intent – of the law and also the spirit of the law.” The law authorizes penalties for lack of compliance. But the National Park Service went without an investigator for nearly five years, Cronkite News reported, so complaints piled up.
The Saginaw Chippewa Tribe of Michigan held a reburial ceremony in December for a set of ancestral remains. Photo by Joseph V. Sowmick / Tribal Observer
The agency has still been able to investigate complaints -- five were completed in fiscal year 2014, according to the report. At the same time, the penalties paid by institutions has remained flat since fiscal year 2011, according to the report from that year. Overall, NPS has imposed just $42,679.34 in penalties since 1996 Get the Story:
Tribes say law requiring return of remains, relics, hasn’t met promise (Cronkite News 5/11)
For museums, sifting decades of artifacts is painstaking, but vital, work (Cronkite News 5/11)
The journey home: Tribal officials discuss importance of repatriation (Cronkite News 5/11)
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