What is NAGPRA?

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) is federal legislation passed in 1990 to provide both a mandate and a process for repatriating Native American objects to their descendants, manage the response to discoveries of Native American remains on federal and tribal lands, and control trafficking in Native American human remains. As a result of the legislation, all institutions receiving federal funds were required, by 1995, to report Native American human remains and cultural objects held in collections to the National NAGPRA Office, operated through the National Park Service. These objects include human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony. Lineal descendants and culturally affiliated tribal entities or organizations may then request the return of these items. As of 2010, the law clarified that culturally unidentifiable human remains in collections must also be repatriated. The most important component of complying with NAGPRA is consultation between institutions and federally recognized tribes to reach understandings of what is held in the institutions and agreements as to how and to whom to repatriate. Because museums and institutions held over 100,000 sets of human ancestral remains, and millions of cultural objects that might be subject to repatriation, NAGPRA is a momentous law that seeks to redress over a hundred years of collecting Indigenous items and remains in the United States of America.

To learn more about NAGPRA, visit the National NAGPRA website

About the Website

Through the course of three collegiums, participants created and collected the educational materials and resources provided on this site. There are two course-content modules, Learning Worldviews and Learning Contexts. These both include suggested readings for instructors and students, links to online resources and media, PowerPoints and notes, and stated learning goals. Case Studies provide cases that can be interchangeably used with the Course modules. The CRM Training module offers a webinar and an online free course for CRM professionals and students. Additional Resources contain a wide variety of references to books, articles, media, and online materials both cited in the modules and suggested.

A note on learning goals: Some educators object–quite rightly–to the use of “learning goals” in a lesson plan. Devotees to the ideas of Paolo Freire (and most of the contributors to this website do admire him) will object that classrooms should be a place where collaboration underlies knowledge production, that learning is something that happens when teachers and students work together. Anne Pyburn likes to say that if she’s not learning, she’s not teaching. Many of us begin our classes by discussing what will be covered in consultation with the entire class. When we ask “why are you taking this class” we use the information to think about what information we will work with.

 If we are committed to collaborative learning and the personal and emotional engagement of Red Pedagogy (Grande 2015), how can we begin a class having already set the learning goals? The answer to this is that although we teach through engagement and responsiveness to student interests and needs, instructors do have goals at the start of each class and although they must be subject to modification, it is important for the person who convenes the class to be honest about their intentions. For materials on this website, the creators cannot engage with the classes that may use their offerings so it is necessary for us to divulge our intentions so that users can evaluate what we offer for both its quality and relevance to their interests and needs. Learning goals, in general, for the project include addressing some of the following:

 

Learning Goals

  • critical thinking through:
    • recognizing assumptions
    • analyze the roles of science, government, and community
    • considering stakeholders’ (especially descendants’) needs, claims, concerns, and costs
    • evaluating possible courses of action and outcomes
    • choosing and using appropriate analytical tools
  • agency through:
    • identifying possible actions
    • gaining confidence in being able to discern solutions through analytical reasoning
    • understanding that, in the 21st century, fields such as archaeology, museum studies, folklore, anthropology, history and other humanities need to be collaborative and consultative
    • making the work of NAGPRA center on people, more than things
    • understanding human decision making within relevant structures and organizations
  • cultural relativism through:
    • understanding and valuing differences in cultures and individuals
    • identifying and valuing community-defined ethics
    • understanding that Indigenous science is science
    • understanding the continuities and limits of history
  • empathy through:
    • listening actively
    • building respect
    • engaging and disagreeing constructively
  • resilience through:
    • making decisions in the absence of complete understanding
    • tolerating uncertainty and coping with ambiguity
    • making decisions in complex situations
    • working in groups
  • communication through:
    • exchanging information for the purpose of understanding
    • working cooperatively within and across groups
    • earning about communication in different contexts

About Section

for more information about the project.

How to Use the Site

and its materials

Land Acknowledgement

Indiana University Bloomington occupies homelands of the Myaamiki, Kiikaapoi, Lënape, Bodwéwadmik, and Saawanwa peoples. Institutions across the region hold millions of Indigenous objects recovered from these lands. The Learning NAGPRA Project recognizes the rights of these people to access and repatriate their belongings. Two hundred years of settling by peoples of foreign descent does not erase the connection these and other indigenous peoples who traversed or used this land have to these places and things. We recognize indigenous people have been displaced from their lands in Africa, Eurasia, the Americas, Oceania, and Australia. An acknowledgement is valuable only as a preface to action. We believe the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act could provide one step in the process of repatriation. International repatriation must logically follow. We recognize that our land acknowledgement is only the beginning.