Abstract

With the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990, Native American communities gained a measure of say over the treatment of ancestral burial sites on federal lands. The law also established a mechanism to help Native American, Alaskan, and Native Hawaiian communities have open dialogue with institutions throughout the country about the return of their ancestors, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony. The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma’s NAGPRA program has found success in a proactive, systematic approach to researching institutions’ archaeological and ethnographic collections for NAGPRA eligibility. The journey brought many lessons, and more than twenty-five repatriations have been finalized, with more on the horizon, allowing for needed healing in our broader community.

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2024 Deanna L. Byrd, Ian Thompson

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.