Milwaukee Public Museum
The Milwaukee Public Museum has the 18th largest collection of unrepatriated Native American remains in the U.S. The institution reported still having the remains of at least 1,600 Native Americans that it has not made available for return to tribes.
The institution has made available for return 3% of the more than 1,600 Native American remains that it reported to the federal government.
Where Native American remains reported by the Milwaukee Public Museum were taken from
Timeline of Native American remains made available for return to tribes by the Milwaukee Public Museum
How the Milwaukee Public Museum compares to other institutions
The Milwaukee Public Museum made Native American remains available for return to 40 tribes.
| Tribe | Remains Made Available for Return To |
|---|---|
| Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians of the Lac du Flambeau Reservation of Wisconsin | 17 |
| Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Tribe of Chippewa Indians of the Bad River Reservation, Wisconsin | 15 |
| Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians of Wisconsin | 15 |
| Lac Vieux Desert Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians of Michigan | 15 |
| Leech Lake Band of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, Minnesota | 15 |
| Mille Lacs Band of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, Minnesota | 15 |
| Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians of Wisconsin | 15 |
| White Earth Band of Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, Minnesota | 15 |
| Three Affiliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold Reservation, North Dakota | 7 |
| Chickasaw Nation | 4 |
| Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma | 4 |
| Quapaw Nation | 4 |
| Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Oklahoma | 3 |
| Forest County Potawatomi Community, Wisconsin | 3 |
| Hannahville Indian Community, Michigan | 3 |
| Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin | 3 |
| Hopi Tribe of Arizona | 3 |
| Nottawaseppi Huron Band of the Potawatomi, Michigan (formerly the Huron Potawatomi, Inc.) | 3 |
| Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians, Michigan and Indiana | 3 |
| Prairie Band of Potawatomi Nation | 3 |
| Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska | 3 |
| Zuni Tribe of the Zuni Reservation, New Mexico | 3 |
| Ak-Chin Indian Community | 2 |
| Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation | 2 |
| Gila River Indian Community of the Gila River Indian Reservation, Arizona | 2 |
| Omaha Tribe of Nebraska | 2 |
| Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community of the Salt River Reservation, Arizona | 2 |
| Tohono O'odham Nation of Arizona | 2 |
| Aleut Corporation | 1 |
| Burns Paiute Tribe | 1 |
| Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes | 1 |
| Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation of Oregon | 1 |
| Fort Bidwell Indian Community of the Fort Bidwell Reservation of California | 1 |
| Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribes of the Fort McDermitt Indian Reservation, Nevada and Oregon | 1 |
| Koniag, Inc. | 1 |
| Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma | 1 |
| Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Mission Indians of the Santa Ynez Reservation, California | 1 |
| Seneca Nation of Indians | 1 |
| Seneca-Cayuga Nation | 1 |
| Shoshone-Paiute Tribes of the Duck Valley Reservation, Nevada | 1 |
The Milwaukee Public Museum reported making 33% of more than 1,000 associated funerary objects available for return to tribes.
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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