Does Your Local Museum or University Still Have Native American Remains?

In 1990, Congress passed a law recognizing the unequal treatment of Native American remains and set up a process for tribes to request their return from museums and other institutions that had them. The law, known as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act or NAGPRA, sought to address this human rights issue by giving Indigenous peoples a way to reclaim their dead.

But more than 30 years after the law’s passage, about half of the remains of more than 210,000 Native Americans have yet to be returned. Tribes have struggled to reclaim them in part because of a lack of federal funding for repatriation and because institutions face little to no consequences for violating the law or dragging their feet.

This database allows you to search for information on the roughly 600 federally funded institutions that reported having such remains to the Department of the Interior. While the data is self-reported, it is a starting point for understanding the damage done by generations of Americans who stole, collected and displayed the remains and possessions of the continent’s Indigenous peoples — and the work done by tribes and institutions to repatriate those Native ancestors since.

Ten institutions hold about half of the reported Native Americans remains that have not been made available for return to tribes. The list includes some of the country’s most prestigious universities, as well as federal agencies whose development projects disturbed Native American burials, and state museums whose archeology and anthropology programs originated with the excavation of key Native American sites and mounds. (At publication, the University of California, Berkeley was #1 on the list, the Tennessee Valley Authority was #8 on the list and the University of Arizona was #11. Updates to the data have changed these rankings since. The text refers to the original 10 institutions unless otherwise noted. See the rankings at publication here.)

Most of these institutions spent years after the law’s passage prioritizing scientific interest in the skeletal remains and objects above the human rights of tribes. Institutions also maintained an unwillingness or inability to bear the costs of taking inventory and fully consulting with tribes. [Read more about why these institutions still have the remains of thousands of Native Americans.]

All of these institutions have used a loophole in the law that allows them to keep Native Americans remains if they deem them as “culturally unidentifiable,” meaning they can’t be culturally affiliated to a modern-day federally recognized tribe. Tribal representatives have long criticized NAGPRA for giving institutions the final say in these decisions.

In recent years, most of these institutions have expressed a greater willingness to engage with tribes, and several have brought on new staff to meet these goals. One of the main challenges many so-called repatriation coordinators face is figuring out exactly what is in their museums’ possession.

This accounting issue persists at the national level. The amount of unrepatriated Native American remains reported by institutions is a minimum estimate of individuals and institutions frequently adjust these numbers when they reinventory groups of remains. Some institutions that are subject to NAGPRA have also entirely failed to report the remains in their possession.

As a result, the numbers provided are best taken as estimates. The actual number and geographic scope of what’s held by publicly funded institutions is larger than what is presently documented.

Where Native American remains reported by institutions were taken from

Each county is a peak

Height is the minimum amount of remains taken from county, as reported by institutions

Color is reported rate of remains made available for return to tribes

Institutions reported no remains taken from these counties

Institutions reported still having large numbers of human remains taken from east of the Mississippi River, in areas where most Indigenous peoples were forcibly removed in the 19th century.

Tribes say that more remains have been taken than are reported from places like Georgia.

In California, where the Native population was decimated by settlers, thousands of human remains are still held by the state’s flagship universities.

Note: Institutions reported remains of 16,693 Native Americans with no county and/or state information. 36% of these remains were made available for return to tribes.

For example, in August 2022, the University of North Dakota announced it had found more than 250 boxes of Native American remains and belongings that had not been previously reported to federal officials. No penalties have been assessed against the institution, which has two years from the time of the discovery to complete an inventory.

“The University is now beginning the process of identifying those ancestors, which will allow them to be returned to their tribes,” said a university spokesperson. “UND remains committed to seeing the repatriation process carried through to completion.”

In 2022, the University of California, Berkeley, which has the largest amount of Native American remains in the country, completed a review of its holdings after facing questions over whether they had accurately cataloged the unrepatriated remains of more than 9,000 Native Americans that they reported to federal officials. A school spokesperson said that what it has reported now represents a “close estimate” of the Native American remains that it holds.

In October 2022, the Interior Department, which is led by the first Native American to serve in a cabinet post, proposed changes to NAGPRA regulations intended to expedite the return of ancestral remains and funerary belongings to tribes within three years. Some who work on repatriation for institutions and tribes have raised concerns about the feasibility of this timeline. Without the proposed regulations, the department projected that repatriating the rest of the Native American remains would take another 25 years roughly to complete at the current pace.

More from The Repatriation Project

1

America’s Biggest Museums Fail to Return Native American Human Remains

2

The Museum Built on Native American Burial Mounds

3

Behind ProPublica’s Reporting on Repatriation

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About the Data

This tool presents a dataset maintained by the National Park Service containing all the Native American human remains and associated funerary objects that institutions have reported to the federal government under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. The dataset includes information about the state and county where remains and objects were taken from, which institutions hold them and whether they have been made available for return to tribes.

The data is self-reported by institutions. The amount of unrepatriated Native American remains reported by institutions is a minimum estimate of individuals and institutions frequently adjust these numbers when they reinventory groups of remains. Some institutions that are subject to NAGPRA have also entirely failed to report the remains in their possession. As a result, the numbers provided are best taken as estimates. The actual number and geographic scope of what’s held by publicly funded institutions is larger than what is presently documented.

ProPublica supplemented this dataset with information about cultural affiliation and disposition to specific tribes by systematically parsing the text of Notices of Inventory Completion published in the Federal Register. An additional dataset from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Tribal Directory Assessment Tool, was used for the section on remains not made available for return from counties that each tribe has indicated interest in to the federal government.

Institution location and tribal headquarters location information was provided by National NAGPRA. The location of some groups that are not federally recognized was provided through research by ProPublica.

Institutions that are part of a larger entity are grouped. (For example, the Mesa Verde National Park is part of the U.S. Department of the Interior.)

Institutions that have not submitted information to the federal government are not listed. The Smithsonian Institution is not listed because its repatriation process falls under the National Museum of the American Indian Act and it is not required to publicly report its holdings with the same detail as institutions subject to NAGPRA.

If you work for an institution and would like to provide comment on your institution’s repatriation efforts, please email [email protected]. If you think the data is incorrect or have a data request, please get in touch. We are aware of some issues with the accuracy of location information and tribes mistakenly being identified for disposition of Native American remains in published notices.

If you want to share something else with ProPublica, we’d like to hear from you.

If you have questions about implementing or complying with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, get in touch with National NAGPRA or the NAGPRA Community of Practice.

We use the word “tribes” to refer to all groups that institutions made Native American remains available to under NAGPRA. This includes tribes, nations, bands, pueblos, communities, Native Alaskan villages, Native Hawaiian organizations and non-federally recognized groups.

Data sources from Department of the Interior, National Park Service, National NAGPRA Program, the Federal Register, Department of Housing and Development, Tribal Directory Assessment Tool

Images by Roberto Machado Noa/LightRocket via Getty Images, Daderot via Wikimedia, Department of the Interior, and Justin Katigbak for ProPublica.

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Additional reporting by Asia Fields, Mary Hudetz and Logan Jaffe for ProPublica and Graham Brewer for NBC News. Additional development by Alec Glassford.