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• 1 media/Screen Shot 2022-04-17 at 2.03.40 PM.png 2022-01-31T17:12:01-08:00 NAGPRA 17 The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act image_header 1135087 2022-04-17T14:38:59-07:00 Our final body is not so much a body as it is the absence of one: Prior to 1990, the skeletal remains of pre-Columbian Native Americans could be found on display in a wide variety of museums. In 1990, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was passed, and the majority of museums took these bones off of display for good. Some of them were returned to the living descendants of the tribes from which they came. Many were re-buried according to the religious and cultural traditions it is believed they practiced in life. Still others were packed into storage and moved to parts of the museum where they would only be accessed by researchers, and not on display to the general public.
  
  All of this took place according to guidelines set by the new law, which still governs the handling of Native American graves, remains, and grave goods. NAGPRA requires that if an organization:
  1. Is federally funded
  2. Possesses human remains or cultural objects AND
  3. Those remains or cultural objects are demonstrated to be culturally, religiously, or genetically connected to an existing and federally recognized Native tribe
  the organization must work with that tribe to steward the remains or objects in culturally appropriate ways. In many cases, this means returning the remains to the tribe for reburial.
  
  NAGPRA has been described as one of the first US laws to consider what is sacred from the Native American perspective. It allows modern-day tribes to establish their connection to the remains and objects in a variety of ways, including DNA, written records, traditional kinship systems, and cultural similarity, which reflects the fact that Native American concepts of ancestry and heritage differ from those of the hegemonic American culture. Repatriation is conducted on a case-by-case basis, and in some instances tribal leaders and museum curators work together to keep cultural objects on display in ways that represent the objects as parts of a living, breathing, changing culture, rather than as static relics of a historical past. This might include continuing to use the objects in ceremonies and rituals, or displaying them in ways that are more “alive” than the traditional sealed glass case (such as regularly rotating them or exposing them to the natural environment). These curatorial choices seek to center modern tribal cultures in the visitor’s mind as something that still exists and is able to represent itself without needing a proxy to interpret or communicate its stories.
  
  In cases where remains cannot be connected to any living tribe, and therefore cannot be repatriated, museums have nevertheless received pushback for keeping the remains on display. Virtually all museums have removed these unclaimed remains to their storage and research areas, where they are accessible only by request of scientists who wish to use the bones in their research. Improvements in identification techniques like ancient DNA may one day identify living relatives of these specimens, but until then many must wait in climate-controlled boxes, a mirror of the burial plots from where they were removed.