Winnebago Tribe Repatriation Records — NAGPRA Database

The Repatriation Database Data from Nov. 29, 2023

Where Native American remains made available for return to the Winnebago Tribe 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 25 Native Americans with no location information were made available for return to the Winnebago Tribe.

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 26 institutions made Native American remains available for return to the Winnebago Tribe.

Institution	Remains Made Available for Return To Tribe
Minnesota Indian Affairs Council	1,173
University of Nebraska State Museum	820
History Nebraska	586
Wisconsin Historical Society	303
University of Iowa, Office of the State Archaeologist	288
State Historical Society of Iowa	142
University of Wisconsin, Madison, Department of Anthropology	141
Beloit College, Logan Museum of Anthropology	107
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Department of Anthropology	83
U.S. Department of the Interior	70
U.S. Department of Defense	40
Field Museum	25
Denver Museum of Nature and Science	22
University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh	14
Coe College	7
Neville Public Museum	7
Oregon State University	7
Illinois State Museum	3
Milwaukee Public Museum	3
University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology	3
Evanston History Center	2
John Michael Kohler Arts Center	2
Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History	2
Berrien County Sheriff's Office	1
Indiana State Museum and Historic Sites Corporation, State of Indiana	1
Sheboygan County Historical Museum	1

Timeline of Native American remains made available for return to the Winnebago Tribe

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 6,700 Native Americans that were taken from counties known to be of interest to the Winnebago Tribe.

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
Illinois State Museum	3,238
Indiana Univ.	1,250 Dept. of Anthropology (1,245) Glenn A. Black Lab. of Archeology (5)
Milwaukee Public Museum	820
Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign	266
Harvard Univ.	147
Center for American Archeology, Kampsville Archeological Center	140
Univ. of Wisconsin, Oshkosh	133
Wisconsin Historical Society	132 Museum Division (94) Historic Preservation Division (38)
Dept. of Defense	78 Rock Island District (72) National Museum of Health and Medicine (3) St. Paul District (2) Omaha District (1)
Oshkosh Public Museum	55
Univ. of Iowa	55
Field Museum	51
Univ. of Wisconsin, La Crosse	49
American Museum of Natural History	44
Univ. of Minnesota, Duluth	38
Minnesota Indian Affairs Council	30
Neville Public Museum	26
Dept. of the Interior	25 Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge (15) Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife Refuge (4) Voyageurs NP (3) BIA (2) Reclamation, Great Plains Region, Nebraska-Kansas Area Office (1)
Western Illinois Univ.	25
Cook County Forest Preserve District	23
Lawrence Univ.	22
Univ. of Nebraska State Museum	17
Grand Rapids Public Museum	15
Univ. of Michigan	15
Hastings Museum	9
Tippecanoe County Historical Association	8
Purdue Univ.	7
Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville	7 Dept. of Anthropology (6) Frank H. McClung Museum (1)
Ball State Univ.	6
Kenosha Public Museum	5
Univ. of Pennsylvania	5
Elgin Public Museum	3
Univ. of Wisconsin, Milwaukee	3
Brigham Young Univ.	2
Cleveland Museum of Natural History	2
Minnesota Historical Society	2
Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer	2
Univ. of Missouri, Columbia	2
Carnegie Museum of Natural History	1
Cass County Historical Society Museum	1
History Nebraska	1
Indiana State Museum and Historic Sites Corporation	1
Indiana State Univ.	1
New York Univ.	1
Putnam Museum	1
Rochester Museum and Science Center	1
Springfield Science Museum	1
Tioga Point Museum	1
Univ. of Kentucky	1
Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison	1

Counties of interest used in estimate include: Allamakee, Boone, Buena Vista, Cass, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Clay, Clayton, Clinton, Crawford, Dallas, Dickinson, Dubuque, Fayette, Floyd, Fremont, Hamilton, Hardin, Humboldt, Ida, Jackson, Jefferson, Jones, Lee, Louisa, Lyon, Marion, Mills, Monona, Muscatine, O Brien, Page, Plymouth, Polk, Pottawattamie, Sioux, Story, Webster, Winnebago, Woodbury and Worth in Iowa. Brown, Carroll, Cook, Fulton, Grundy, Hancock, Henderson, Jo Daviess, Kane, La Salle, Lake, Lee, Ogle, Stephenson, Whiteside, Will and Winnebago in Illinois. Delaware and Tippecanoe in Indiana. Berrien in Michigan. Aitkin, Anoka, Becker, Beltrami, Benton, Big Stone, Blue Earth, Brown, Carver, Cass, Clearwater, Crow Wing, Dakota, Douglas, Freeborn, Hennepin, Itasca, Kanabec, Kandiyohi, Kittson, Koochiching, Marshall, Meeker, Mille Lacs, Murray, Nicollet, Norman, Otter Tail, Polk, Pope, Ramsey, Red Lake, Sherburne, St. Louis, Stearns, Todd, Traverse, Wabasha, Wadena, Washington, Watonwan, Wilkin, Winona, Wright and Yellow Medicine in Minnesota. 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, Thurston, Valley, Washington and Webster in Nebraska. Adams, Brown, Columbia, Crawford, Dane, Dodge, Door, Fond Du Lac, Forest, Grant, Green, Green Lake, Iowa, Jackson, Jefferson, Juneau, Kenosha, La Crosse, Lafayette, Marathon, Marquette, Milwaukee, Monroe, Oneida, Ozaukee, Pierce, Richland, Rock, Sauk, Sawyer, Sheboygan, Vernon, Waukesha, Winnebago and Wood 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 Winnebago Tribe. 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.