Kickapoo Tribe in Kansas Repatriation Records — NAGPRA Database

The Repatriation Database Data from Nov. 29, 2023

Where Native American remains made available for return to the Kickapoo Tribe in Kansas 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 four Native Americans with no location information were made available for return to the Kickapoo Tribe in Kansas.

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 Kickapoo Tribe in Kansas.

Institution	Remains Made Available for Return To Tribe
University of Nebraska State Museum	820
History Nebraska	586
University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology	172
Grand Valley State University	113
University of Iowa, Office of the State Archaeologist	54
Michigan State University	46
Field Museum	42
U.S. Department of Defense	40
Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne-Archaeological Survey	38
Kansas State University	28
U.S. Department of the Interior	23
Historical Society of Saginaw County, Inc.	19
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Department of Anthropology	18
Beloit College, Logan Museum of Anthropology	13
University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh	13
Princeton University	12
Museum of Ojibwa Culture and Marquette Mission Park - City of St. Ignace	8
Coe College	7
Denver Museum of Nature and Science	5
Michigan State Historic Preservation Office	5
Detroit Institute of Arts	2
Indiana State Museum and Historic Sites Corporation, State of Indiana	2
MetroParks of the Toledo Area	2
American Museum of Natural History	1
Berrien County Sheriff's Office	1
City of Traverse City	1
Harvard University	1
Illinois State Museum	1
Kansas State Historical Society	1
Oregon State University	1
Sierra Mono Museum	1
University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology	1

Timeline of Native American remains made available for return to the Kickapoo Tribe in Kansas

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 5,800 Native Americans that were taken from counties known to be of interest to the Kickapoo Tribe in Kansas.

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
Indiana Univ.	1,521 Dept. of Anthropology (1,472) Glenn A. Black Lab. of Archeology (49)
Center for American Archeology, Kampsville Archeological Center	1,197
Illinois State Museum	703
Univ. of Michigan	546
Milwaukee Public Museum	403
Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign	336
Harvard Univ.	283
Dept. of Defense	205 St. Louis District (203) National Museum of Health and Medicine (1) Omaha District (1)
Univ. of Wisconsin, Oshkosh	130
Ohio History Connection	64
Oshkosh Public Museum	55
American Museum of Natural History	47
Field Museum	44
Wisconsin Historical Society	43 Museum Division (42) Historic Preservation Division (1)
Grand Rapids Public Museum	34
Indiana State Univ.	32
Kansas State Historical Society	19
Indiana State Museum and Historic Sites Corporation	18
Univ. of Toledo	15
Wayne State Univ.	14
Hastings Museum	13
Gilcrease Museum	12
Lawrence Univ.	11
Michigan State Historic Preservation Office	11
Dept. of the Interior	11 Illinois River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge (10) Reclamation, Great Plains Region, Nebraska-Kansas Area Office (1)
Sul Ross State Univ.	10
Tippecanoe County Historical Association	8
Univ. of Kansas	8
Filson Historical Society	7
Neville Public Museum	7
Purdue Univ.	7
Univ. of Pennsylvania	7
Ball State Univ.	6
Stanford Univ. Heritage Services	6
Univ. of Notre Dame	6
Kenosha Public Museum	5
Robert S. Peabody Institute of Archaeology	5
Witte Museum	5
Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville	4 Dept. of Anthropology (3) Frank H. McClung Museum (1)
Elgin Public Museum	3
Nassau County Dept. of Parks and Recreation	3
New York Univ.	3
Univ. of Nebraska State Museum	3
Univ. of Wisconsin, Milwaukee	3
Alma College	2
Brigham Young Univ.	2
Cleveland Museum of Natural History	2
Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer	2
Univ. of Louisville	2
Cass County Historical Society Museum	1
Earlham College	1
Putnam Museum	1
Rochester Museum and Science Center	1
Springfield Science Museum	1
The History Museum	1
Tioga Point Museum	1
Dept. of Agriculture	1
Univ. of Indianapolis	1
Univ. of Kentucky	1
Univ. of Texas at Austin	1
Western Illinois Univ.	1
Wichita State Univ.	1

Counties of interest used in estimate include: Brown, Bureau, Cass, Champaign, Christian, Clark, Coles, Crawford, Cumberland, De Witt, Douglas, Edgar, Effingham, Ford, Greene, Grundy, Hancock, Iroquois, Jasper, Jersey, Jo Daviess, Kane, Kankakee, La Salle, Lasalle, Livingston, Logan, Macon, Macoupin, Marshall, Mason, Mclean, Menard, Morgan, Moultrie, Peoria, Putnam, Sangamon, Schuyler, Scott, Shelby, Tazewell, Vermilion, Will and Woodford in Illinois. Allen, Benton, Clark, Delaware, Dubois, Fountain, La Porte, Parke, Porter, St. Joseph, Tippecanoe, Vermillion, Vigo, Warren and Whitley in Indiana. Atchison, Brown, Doniphan, Jackson, Jefferson, Leavenworth and Nemaha in Kansas. Allegan, Bay, Berrien, Emmet, Ionia, Kalamazoo, Kent, Mackinac, Macomb, Mecosta, Missaukee, Monroe, Newaygo, Oceana, Ottawa, Saginaw and Wayne in Michigan. Adams, Antelope, Banner, Boone, Box Butte, Boyd, Buffalo, Burt, Cass, Cedar, Chase, Cherry, Cuming, Custer, Dakota, Dawes, Dawson, Dixon, Dodge, Douglas, Dundy, Fillmore, Franklin, Frontier, Furnas, Gage, Garden, Garfield, Hall, Harlan, Hitchcock, Holt, Hooker, Howard, Keith, Keya Paha, Knox, Lancaster, Lincoln, Madison, Mcpherson, Morrill, Nance, Nemaha, Platte, Red Willow, Richardson, Sarpy, Saunders, Scotts Bluff, Sherman, Sioux, Stanton, Thayer, Valley, Washington and Webster in Nebraska. Lucas and Madison in Ohio. Brewster in Texas. Brown, Grant, Green Lake, Jefferson, Kenosha, Milwaukee, Rock, Waukesha and Winnebago in Wisconsin.

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.

These tribes were also listed when institutions culturally affiliated Native American remains to the Kickapoo Tribe in Kansas. 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.

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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.