Alabama-Quassarte Tribal Town Repatriation Records — NAGPRA Database

The Repatriation Database Data from Nov. 29, 2023

Where Native American remains made available for return to the Alabama-Quassarte Tribal Town were taken from

Each county is a peak

Height is amount of remains taken from county and made available by institutions for return to tribe

No remains taken from these counties made available for return to tribe

Institution that made remains available for return

Note: Remains of three Native Americans with no location information were made available for return to the Alabama-Quassarte Tribal Town.

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.

These 32 institutions made Native American remains available for return to the Alabama-Quassarte Tribal Town.

Institution	Remains Made Available for Return To Tribe
University of Alabama Museums	10,310
Tennessee Valley Authority	1,463
Mississippi Dept. of Archives and History	495
University of California, San Diego	478
Georgia Department of Natural Resources	404
U.S. Department of the Interior	219
Robert S. Peabody Institute of Archaeology, Phillips Academy	106
U.S. Department of Defense	92
Florida State University, Department of Anthropology	72
Fernbank Museum of Natural History	60
Alabama Department of Archives & History	37
Columbus State University	28
University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology	23
Pittsburg State University	19
Harvard University	9
University of South Alabama, Center for Archaeological Studies	7
Field Museum	3
Florida Department of State	3
Augusta State University	2
Emory University, Michael C. Carlos Museum	2
Indiana University	2
New York University, College of Dentistry	2
U.S. Department of Agriculture	2
University of Denver, Museum of Anthropology	2
Yale University, Peabody Museum of Natural History	2
American Museum of Natural History	1
Appalachian State University, Department of Anthropology	1
Auburn University	1
Florence Indian Mound Museum	1
Georgia Department of Transportation	1
University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology	1
Wistar Institute	1

Timeline of Native American remains made available for return to the Alabama-Quassarte Tribal Town

Tribal and institutional capacity, funding, staffing, regulatory changes, audits, Review Committee decisions and litigation may influence timelines. Under NAGPRA, institutions determine whether Native American remains may be returned through cultural affiliation using evidence such as tribal traditional knowledge and biological and archaeological links, or through disposition based on geographic affiliation.

These institutions have not made available for return the remains of at least 5,900 Native Americans that were taken from counties known to be of interest to the Alabama-Quassarte Tribal Town.

These are estimates calculated using remains not made available for return from counties that the tribe has previously been eligible to claim remains from, as well as counties that the tribe has indicated interest in to the federal government. They are not comprehensive figures. The tribe may not wish to claim the remains, and other tribes may also seek to claim them.

Institution	Remains Not Made Available for Return That Were Taken From Counties of Interest to the Tribe
Univ. of Alabama	2,418
Auburn Univ.	767
Dept. of Defense	324 Mobile District (224) Tulsa District (74) Galveston District (13) National Museum of Health and Medicine (9) Hurlburt Air Field (2) Fort Benning (1) Little Rock District (1)
Dept. of the Interior	242 Natchitoches National Fish Hatchery (100) Southeast Archeological Center (80) Ocmulgee Mounds NHP (55) Harris Neck National Wildlife Refuge (3) Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge (1) Fort Frederica NM (1) Pinckney Island National Wildlife Refuge (1) Savannah National Wildlife Refuge (1)
Harvard Univ.	212
Univ. of Texas at Austin	180
Mississippi State Univ.	179
Univ. of Florida	143
Fernbank Museum of Natural History	141
Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville	135 Frank H. McClung Museum (127) Dept. of Anthropology (8)
Georgia Dept. of Natural Resources	130
Univ. of Georgia	127
Florida Dept. of State	114
Yale Univ.	110
Mississippi Dept. of Archives and History	85
Univ. of South Alabama	58
Univ. of Oklahoma	54 Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History (51) Oklahoma Archeological Survey (3)
American Museum of Natural History	45
Univ. of Pennsylvania	44
Charleston Museum	39
Anniston Museum of Natural History	38
Alabama Dept. of Archives & History	36
Georgia Power	33
Louisiana State Univ.	26 Museum of Natural Science (21) Dept. of Anthropology (5)
Univ. of South Carolina, SCIAA	26
Univ. of Florida, Florida Museum of Natural History + Florida Dept. of State	25
Augusta Museum of History	21
Houston Museum of Natural Science	18
Jacksonville State Univ.	16
Gilcrease Museum	15
Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	14
Field Museum	13
Florida State Univ.	13
HistoryMiami Museum	8
Univ. of West Florida	8
Georgia Southern Univ.	7
Robert S. Peabody Institute of Archaeology	6
Columbus Museum	5
Milwaukee Public Museum	5
Univ. of Michigan	5
Grand Rapids Public Museum	4
Indiana Univ.	4
San Bernardino County Museum	4
South Georgia State College	3
Univ. of Arkansas	3
Univ. of Memphis	3
Brown Univ.	2
Rochester Museum and Science Center	2
Univ. of California, Riverside	2
Wagner Free Institute of Science	2
Brazos Valley Museum of Natural History	1
City of Fort Smith	1
Dartmouth College	1
Louisiana Dept. of Culture, Recreation, and Tourism	1
Louisiana State Exhibit Museum	1
Loxahatchee Historical Society	1
Missouri Historical Society	1
Nassau County Dept. of Parks and Recreation	1
Spratt-Mead Museum	1
Texas A and M Univ.	1
Texas Historical Commission	1
Dept. of Agriculture	1
Univ. of Tulsa	1
West Virginia Division of Culture and History	1

Counties of interest used in estimate include: Autauga, Baldwin, Barbour, Bibb, Blount, Bullock, Butler, Calhoun, Chambers, Cherokee, Chilton, Choctaw, Clarke, Clay, Cleburne, Coffee, Colbert, Conecuh, Coosa, Covington, Crenshaw, Cullman, Dale, Dallas, Dekalb, Elmore, Escambia, Etowah, Fayette, Franklin, Geneva, Greene, Hale, Henry, Houston, Jackson, Jefferson, Lamar, Lauderdale, Lawrence, Lee, Limestone, Lowndes, Macon, Madison, Marengo, Marion, Marshall, Mobile, Monroe, Montgomery, Morgan, Perry, Pickens, Pike, Randolph, Russell, Shelby, St. Clair, Sumter, Talladega, Tallapoosa, Tuscaloosa, Walker, Washington, Wilcox and Winston in Alabama. Chicot, Conway, Crawford, Crittenden, Desha, Franklin, Jefferson, Johnson, Lee, Lincoln, Lonoke, Monroe, Perry, Phillips, Pope, Prairie, Pulaski and St. Francis in Arkansas. Kings in California. Escambia, Gadsden, Highlands, Hillsborough, Jackson, Lee, Okaloosa, Okeechobee, Osceola, Santa Rosa, Sumter and Walton in Florida. Appling, Atkinson, Bacon, Baker, Baldwin, Banks, Barrow, Bartow, Ben Hill, Berrien, Bibb, Bleckley, Brantley, Brooks, Bryan, Bulloch, Burke, Butts, Calhoun, Camden, Candler, Carroll, Catoosa, Charlton, Chatham, Chattahoochee, Chattooga, Cherokee, Clarke, Clay, Clayton, Clinch, Cobb, Coffee, Colquitt, Columbia, Cook, Coweta, Crawford, Crisp, Dade, Dawson, Decatur, Dekalb, Dodge, Dooly, Dougherty, Douglas, Early, Echols, Effingham, Elbert, Emanuel, Evans, Fannin, Fayette, Floyd, Forsyth, Franklin, Fulton, Gilmer, Glascock, Glynn, Gordon, Grady, Greene, Gwinnett, Habersham, Hall, Hancock, Haralson, Harris, Hart, Heard, Henry, Houston, Irwin, Jackson, Jasper, Jeff Davis, Jefferson, Jenkins, Johnson, Jones, Lamar, Lanier, Laurens, Lee, Liberty, Lincoln, Long, Lowndes, Lumpkin, Macon, Madison, Marion, Mcduffie, Mcintosh, Meriwether, Miller, Mitchell, Monroe, Montgomery, Morgan, Murray, Muscogee, Newton, Oconee, Oglethorpe, Paulding, Peach, Pickens, Pierce, Pike, Polk, Pulaski, Putnam, Quitman, Rabun, Randolph, Richmond, Rockdale, Schley, Screven, Seminole, Spalding, Stephens, Stewart, Sumter, Talbot, Taliaferro, Tattnall, Taylor, Telfair, Terrell, Thomas, Tift, Toombs, Towns, Treutlen, Troup, Turner, Twiggs, Union, Upson, Walker, Walton, Ware, Warren, Washington, Wayne, Webster, Wheeler, White, Whitfield, Wilcox, Wilkes, Wilkinson and Worth in Georgia. Acadia, Allen, Avoyelles, Beauregard, Calcasieu, Cameron, East Baton Rouge, Evangeline, Jefferson Davis, Livingston, Natchitoches, Orleans, Pointe Coupee, Red River, St. Bernard, St. John The Baptist, St. Landry, Tangipahoa, Vermilion, Vernon and West Feliciana in Louisiana. Choctaw, Claiborne, Clay, De Soto, Hancock, Itawamba, Lafayette, Lee, Monroe, Oktibbeha, Panola, Pontotoc, Prentiss, Quitman, Tate, Tishomingo, Tunica, Union, Warren, Washington, Webster, Winston and Yalobusha in Mississippi. Adair, Cherokee, Creek, Hughes, Mayes, Mcintosh, Muskogee, Okfuskee, Okmulgee, Rogers, Seminole, Sequoyah, Tulsa and Wagoner in Oklahoma. Fayette, Franklin, Giles, Hardeman, Hardin, Knox, Lawrence, Lincoln, Marion, Mcnairy, Shelby and Wayne in Tennessee. Chambers, Galveston, Hardin, Jasper, Jefferson, Liberty, Newton, Orange, Polk, San Jacinto and Tyler in Texas.

Search for institutions holding Native American remains and tribes seeking to reclaim them

Try the University of California, Berkeley, the Chickasaw Nation or Arizona.

Institutions that have not submitted information to the federal government are not listed.

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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

by Ash Ngu and Andrea Suozzo Jan. 11, 2023 Data from Nov. 29, 2023 Additional reporting by Asia Fields, Mary Hudetz and Logan Jaffe for ProPublica and Graham Brewer for NBC News. Additional development by Alec Glassford.