Skip to content
ProPublica
Donate
ProPublica
Donate
The Repatriation Database Data from Jan. 6, 2025 Utah

Salt Lake County, Utah

Institutions reported making 2% of the remains of 48 Native Americans taken from Salt Lake County, Utah available for return to tribes under NAGPRA.

remains of 1 Native American made available for return to tribes
remains of at least 47 Native Americans not made available for return

There are four institutions that reported Native American remains taken from Salt Lake County, Utah.

InstitutionRemains Not Made Available for ReturnRemains Made Available for Return% of Remains Made Available for Return
Natural History Museum of Utah4400%
Harvard University200%
Brigham Young University, Museum of Peoples and Cultures100%
U.S. Department of Defense01100%
Under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, when an institution establishes a connection between tribes and remains, it must publish a list of the tribes eligible to make a repatriation claim. The remains are then made available for return to the tribe(s). Once a tribal claim is made, physical transfer may occur. Many remains have been physically returned to tribes, but data on this is spotty because the law does not require institutions to report when these transfers occur.

Institutions made Native American remains taken from Salt Lake County, Utah available for return to 20 tribes.

Institutions often make remains available for return to multiple tribes, so the amount of remains listed below may be counted for more than one tribe.
TribeRemains Made Available for Return to Tribe
Big Pine Paiute Tribe of the Owens Valley1
Bishop Paiute Tribe1
Bridgeport Indian Colony1
Duckwater Shoshone Tribe of the Duckwater Reservation, Nevada1
Eastern Shoshone Tribe of the Wind River Reservation, Wyoming1
Ely Shoshone Tribe of Nevada1
Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribes of the Fort McDermitt Indian Reservation, Nevada and Oregon1
Las Vegas Tribe of Paiute Indians of the Las Vegas Indian Colony, Nevada1
Lone Pine Paiute-Shoshone Tribe1
Lovelock Paiute Tribe of the Lovelock Indian Colony, Nevada1
Northwestern Band of Shoshoni Nation1
Paiute-Shoshone Tribe of the Fallon Reservation and Colony, Nevada1
Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, Nevada1
Shoshone-Bannock Tribes of the Fort Hall Reservation1
Shoshone-Paiute Tribes of the Duck Valley Reservation, Nevada1
Southern Ute Indian Tribe of the Southern Ute Reservation, Colorado1
Susanville Indian Rancheria, California1
Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone Indians of Nevada1
Washoe Tribe of Nevada & California1
Yomba Shoshone Tribe of the Yomba Reservation, Nevada1
Get in touch

Know how an institution is handling repatriation? Have a personal story to share? We'd like to hear from you.

Learn how to report on repatriation

Watch an informational webinar with our reporters.

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