The Roots of NAGPRA

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act was signed into law by US President George Bush in 1990. It was created to protect cemeteries on federal and tribal lands, and to provide a way to return the human skeletal material and associated funerary objects in the nation's scientific and museum collections to culturally affiliated tribes. While NAGPRA is not a perfect document, it is the first enacted legislation of its kind, and it is the direct result of a decade of political activism at the heart of what could be termed the Native American repatriation movement. The birth struggles of the repatriation movement have been painful to archaeologists, who have been forced to adapt to the fact that who and how we study is of personal and political importance to people outside of our ivied walls.

What are the roots of the repatriation movement? Is there a particular event or series of events that you can point to and say, there it began?

The common folklore begins the modern movement with Maria Pearson’s protests in Iowa. And in that you see many of the questions, sensible and not, that get replayed.

· How do you tell an Indian grave in a marked cemetery and why treat it differently?
· You are assimilated. What do you care about these ancient Indians?
· What business does a Lakota have in the matter of Potawatomi burials?
· You should leave us alone so we can tell you things you don’t know about your own past.

Can you tell me a little about how you got interested in detailing the history of the repatriation movement?

I have a general gripe that good guys seldom get credit for some reason.

I and my closest friends were involved in the civil rights movement as regards public accommodations, voting rights, labor organizing, as well as the anti-war movement (right after I got done serving my hitch). And on all those issues, we were right. Yet we can all name people who stood foursquare behind grossly immoral policies and remain bigshots and—worse—look down on their betters.

We are seeing some of the same thing in the repatriation movement. People who fought tooth and nail with every bogus argument now acting like they were really civilized all along. Just because we have to work with barbarians does not mean we should forget.

The history is just an academic detour. My involvement with repatriation did not happen on the political and academic levels at the same time.

An Indian organization in Texas—the American Indian Resource and Education Coalition—came to the Texas Indian Bar Association, where I was in the leadership, complaining about poor treatment by the State Archeologist and the Texas Historical Commission, treatment in the "lie, cheat and steal" mode.

They needed someone to get involved who could invoke the sunshine laws, and it did not hurt that I was still an active judge at the time.

Shortly after I got in the trenches, my Master’s thesis topic went belly up. By that I mean I found an article in the UCLA Law Review that WAS my thesis. Now, if I could have done it better, I would have—but the topic had simply been nailed. (It involved suing the state directly under state constitutional provisions.) So I was at loose ends for a topic about the same time I got involved with repatriation.

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