Ohio History Connection (formerly the Ohio Historical Society)
Located in Ohio · Read the institution’s response
The Ohio History Connection has the largest collection of unrepatriated Native American remains in the U.S. The institution reported still having the remains of at least 7,100 Native Americans that it has not made available for return to tribes.
The institution has made available for return 0.2% of the more than 7,100 Native American remains that it reported to the federal government.
Where Native American remains reported by the Ohio History Connection were taken from
Timeline of Native American remains made available for return to tribes by the Ohio History Connection
How the Ohio History Connection compares to other institutions
The Ohio History Connection made Native American remains available for return to five tribes.
| Tribe | Remains Made Available for Return To |
|---|---|
| Delaware Tribe of Indians | 9 |
| Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma | 3 |
| Ottawa Tribe of Oklahoma | 3 |
| Blackfeet Tribe of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation of Montana | 1 |
| Delaware Nation, Oklahoma | 1 |
The Ohio History Connection reported making 0.1% of more than 110,300 associated funerary objects available for return to tribes.
The Ohio History Connection’s response:
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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
The institution's original designation of so many collections as culturally unidentifiable may have “been used as a means to keep people on shelves for research and for other things that our institution just doesn’t allow anymore,” said Alex Wesaw, the museum's director of American Indian relations and a citizen of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians.
The museum's NAGPRA website states, “We, at the Ohio History Connection, recognize that a large and important part of our archaeology collections relates to the Indigenous American Indian cultures. We are stewards of the sites, artifacts and human remains that relate to the pre-contact and contact era legacy of these American Indian Tribes. It is our responsibility to actively consult with contemporary federally-recognized Indian Tribes both to offer and to share what has been learned and to listen as Tribes inform us about histories, homelands and items in the collections.”