Person in cultural clothing dancing and an altar of three boxes and Indigenous pieces

A student does a ceremonial dance at U.T. Austin to raise awareness about Indigenous remains (left); an altar erected to symbolize remains still stored in cardboard boxes. Michael Minasi/KUT (dance); Indigenous Cultures Institute (altar)

Reclaiming Their Ancestors

Colleges around the country have held on to the remains of Native Americans for centuries. Now, Indigenous people are working to rebury them.

August 29, 2022

By Chrisanne Grisé

This article was updated as of September 2, 2022.

For four years, members of the Miakan-Garza Band, an Indigenous group in Texas, had been asking the University of Texas at Austin to return the remains of three of their ancestors. The remains had been dug up and brought to the school decades before, and now the band wanted to rebury them.

U.T. Austin, however, had denied the requests. So the community began campaigning to change the school’s mind, spreading the word through in-person and online events. Then, in September 2020, a group of Indigenous students met with university officials. Afterward, the school said it would start the federal legal process required to rebury the remains.

“The University of Texas at Austin respects the Indigenous people who live and have lived in Texas and recognizes the spiritual and cultural significance of internment of their ancestors,” president Jay Hartzell wrote in a letter.

The Miakan-Garza band thought it had won a victory, but two years later, according to the university, the process is still underway at the federal level. The school has about 2,400 Indigenous remains in its possession.

U.T. Austin isn’t the only institution holding on to remains and artifacts from Indigenous people. Colleges around the country—including Harvard University, Vassar College, the University of California, Berkeley, and many more—are increasingly coming under fire for their collections.

“This is first and foremost an issue of Indigenous rights,” says Veronica Pasfield of the Bay Mills Indian Community in Michigan. “The right to protect the graves of your ancestors and relatives is one of the most fundamental human rights on the planet.”

‘Deeply Spiritual and Emotional’

In the 18th and 19th centuries, many anthropologists began digging up Native American graves to study the bones, often using skull measurements to try to prove that White people were superior. As time passed, many of those remains eventually ended up at colleges or museums, sometimes shoved into boxes and forgotten in storage. U.S. institutions possess more than 116,000 sets of Native American remains today, according to the National Park Service.

“We believe that if you disrupt somebody’s remains from the earth, then that halts their spiritual journey,” says Emi Aguilar of the Miakan-Garza Band. “They’re in limbo and can’t be in peace.”

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), passed by Congress in 1990, set criteria under which federally recognized Native American tribes could reclaim remains and sacred objects from institutions such as public colleges and museums, a process know as repatriation.

‘This is first and foremost an issue of Indigenous rights.’

More than 30 years later, some officials acknowledge that the law hasn’t been effective enough. To reclaim artifacts, tribes undergo an expensive process overseen by the very institutions they’re petitioning. It can be difficult to provide proof that the remains belong to a group, as many Indigenous people track their history orally. Plus, NAGPRA applies only to federally recognized tribes, and about 400 tribes, including the Miakan-Garza Band, don’t have that recognition. Institutions are not legally required to meet with nonfederally recognized Indigenous groups.

Institutions argue that identifying the cultural affiliation of remains can be difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. They need multiple types of evidence beyond geographical information, they say, creating a significant research hurdle.

But some tribal officials believe the institutions are exaggerating. They argue that the age and location of the burial site should make it fairly simple to identify who the remains belong to.

When remains are returned, tribes often hold poignant reburial ceremonies. In 2014, when the University of Michigan repatriated 94 sets of remains to the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe, members endured freezing temperatures to commemorate the event.

“It’s a deeply spiritual and emotional thing that comes from the heart,” Tony Perry, who took part in the ceremony, told the Tribal Observer at the time.

The Rematriation of Sophia Tetoff

A Native American student journeys to retrieve and reinter the remains of her great-great-aunt.

Improving the Process

Some schools are trying to improve the repatriation process. Indiana University, for example, began working with tribal nations to establish a NAGPRA review board last year. And many institutions have in recent years announced new policies that prohibit research on Indigenous remains.

“Historically, U.C. Berkeley has seen repatriation and NAGPRA as a process that conflicts with the research interests of the university,” Thomas Torma, the school’s NAGPRA liaison, says. But now, he adds, the school has transferred hundreds of remains back to tribes because of policy changes.

The Biden administration has also said it will enforce NAGPRA more strongly. And last fall, Deb Haaland, secretary of the Interior Department and the first Native American to hold a cabinet post, announced plans to strengthen the law.

Though a lot of work remains to be done, many Indigenous people say they’re determined to continue the fight.

“It’s a national movement,” says Mario Garza, cultural preservation officer of the Miakan-Garza Band. “We will never give up until the last remain is repatriated.”