Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA)

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) is a federal law passed in 1990, that calls upon federal agencies and institutions with possession or control of Native American funerary objects, to return them to lineal descendants, Indian tribes, and Native Hawaiian organizations.

The Anthropology Department currently has the care of the remains of 63 ancestors with known tribal affiliations and 18 ancestors with unidentified affiliations and hundreds of associated funerary objects.

Western faculty have actively worked toward repatriating remains and artifacts that were sent to the university throughout the 1900s.

Currently all ancestral remains and items of cultural patrimony have been or are in the process of being legally repatriated.