The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, requires museums, universities and other institutions that receive federal funding to return Native American ancestral remains and cultural items to their original tribes. Though the law passed nearly 35 years ago, many institutions have failed to fulfill its requirements.
Oregon State University recently opened a new facility designed to advance its NAGPRA obligations. The two buildings house a records room, a laboratory and a space to consult with tribal members as they move through the repatriation process. The new buildings are also better equipped than the old facility to store cultural items and remains of tribal ancestors awaiting return.
Dawn Marie Alapisco is the director of the NAGPRA Office within OSU’s Office of Institutional Diversity. She joins us to share more about the new facility and how institutions should be approaching their NAGPRA requirements.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, requires museums, universities and other institutions to return ancestral remains and cultural items to their original tribes. But even though the law passed nearly 35 years ago, many institutions have failed to fulfill its requirements. Oregon State University recently opened a new facility designed to address this.
Dawn Marie Alapisco is the director of the NAGPRA Office within OSU’s Office of Institutional Diversity. She joins us now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.
Dawn Marie Alapisco: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Miller: How did this law come to be?
Alapisco: The history of the law really goes back to the founding of the National Park Service and the Antiquities Act of 1906. Basically, there have been a lot of cultural resource laws that have been built up, starting with the Antiquities Act of 1906, that have protected cultural resources in different ways, but they haven’t really had much bite. And a lot of what they did was they created a curational crisis, basically. There were a lot of vocational archaeologists and academic archaeologists going out and doing work, and then there were cultural resource management firms also going out and doing work. And the laws were basically saying, before we do federal building, we need to make sure we’re protecting cultural resources. But oftentimes what would happen is, instead of saying, oh, we have a site here, let’s leave it alone and move the project, it was, let’s excavate all of this material and we’ll deal with it all later. And that just created this crisis, right?
It kind of came to a head when Maria Pearson … She was the wife of a civil engineer in Ohio. Her husband came home and he’s like, “I have something really bad to tell you. We found a graveyard while we were preparing this road project. And everyone was disinterred and 26 of the individuals who were determined to be white are being immediately reinterred. And the individuals who were determined to be Native are being sent to the state museum.” [That] was the law at the time. So she went and camped out at the governor’s office, and basically forced her way in and demanded, “Give me back my people.”
So cultural resources at the state level started happening. Maria Pearson is often viewed as being kind of the mother of NAGPRA. The national level law really comes from her advocacy, and a larger sovereignty and Native American rights advocacy that was going on in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s.
Miller: Is it possible to know how successful NAGPRA has been over the last 35 years, a percentage of remains or cultural objects that have actually been returned to tribes?
Alapisco: Yes, actually, the GAO, the Government Accountability Office, recently did put out information on that. From the ancestors and cultural items that were reported in 1995, 55% of the ancestors have been affiliated and potentially returned. So there’s no official way of determining how many have actually gone home, but there is a way of determining how many have been affiliated and gone through the legal process set out by the national NAGPRA office within the National Park Service.
Miller: Oh, because being affiliated and identified is separate from actually being returned?
Alapisco: Yes, but for most cases, you have to have the affiliation for the repatriation to happen. But there are cases … And this is one of the large inequities in the system. Finding land for reburial and reburial processes are often very difficult, and the onus of that typically falls on tribes. So, institutions, agencies and museums, we all need to start working a little bit more creatively to do our part in helping with that. And that’s one of the next steps in what OSU is doing after the facility.
Miller: Can you describe what’s different about the new facility that opened not long ago and why this was necessary?
Alapisco: Well, the new facility is purpose-built. It’s new construction. It’s something that was developed in consultation with the nine federally-recognized sovereign tribal nations in the state of Oregon. And OSU did outreach. We interacted with each tribe as they wanted to interact with us. So there were some cases where we went to tribal council meetings and we discussed the situation that was happening. And basically, the ancestors had been in a building that was in desperate need of renovation and a new program was going to be put in that building that was incompatible with being around ancestors. So we stopped all building. We stopped everything in the building. And basically, that was the space for the ancestors while we worked through this process.
We went into consultation with each of the tribes and said, “This is where we’re at. We need your help in determining how to move forward in the most appropriate way possible.” And this is what came out of it – a purpose-built facility off campus. We’re still on OSU land, but we are not in the heart of campus, which is something new for a lot of organizations. And we believe we are the first to actually move into this sort of consultation method, where we’re almost doing a co-curation with the tribes in the state of Oregon to care for the ancestors that are in our stewardship.
Miller: Can you describe what it was like to transfer all of the physical objects and the human remains of ancestors from the old building to the new building?
Alapisco: It’s indescribable, to be quite honest. We had this beautifully orchestrated and we had everything scheduled down to the minute, and that’s not what happened. What happened is the tribes took over and that’s what was supposed to happen. That was actually the intention. We had to have our pieces in place so we could orchestrate the university aspects of it. But we did everything, we tried to think of everything. We made sure all the smoke alarms were often in the old building, and the new building actually has smoke alarms where we can sage without having to turn them off.
We closed the street in front of the building and we had sentries out. We had a whole group of students, all of the students from the kaku-ixt mana ina haws, or what used to be called the Longhouse. They were kind of keeping everyone away from the front of the building. And we had representatives from seven of the nine nations on campus to pray, sing, give offerings to the ancestors and talk to them as they were being moved. And the tribes are the ones who actually did the moving. I was kind of the one pointing in all the directions, but we had the tribal representatives actually do the physical moving of the ancestors, as is appropriate.
Miller: What are the loopholes or excuses that institutions have used in the past, or maybe are still using today, to say why they don’t feel like they need to return remains or objects?
Alapisco: There’s a really big one that NAGPRA is anti-science, and that it’s privileging religion and philosophy over scientific inquiry. But the reality is, with that one, NAGPRA actually created a space where institutions had to actually look and see what they had, because most institutions weren’t doing this sort of inquiry anyway. There’s the, “you haven’t given us enough evidence to affiliate,” or, “we don’t need to repatriate cultural items, we’re just going to repatriate ancestors.” There’s been, “these ancestors are too old to be affiliated with any modern tribe, so they are not subject to NAGPRA.” And the ancient one or the Kennewick Man case kind of ended that discussion. I mean, I hope that it did.
Miller: Well, that gets to my next question. To what extent are all of these responses that folks might hear from museums or universities still being put forward?
Alapisco: I think to a much lesser extent, but you’ll hear about a case every now and then where an institution is not wanting to open assemblages for consultation, or they’re just not responding in a meaningful way. It’s less so than it was 10, 15, 20 years ago. But what we are seeing is a movement in the other direction. We’re seeing institutions that for a very long time were not complying, all of a sudden complying.
I do not want to disparage any institution. But we also need to recognize that each NAGPRA case, each NAGPRA assemblage, each NAGPRA practitioner and repatriation is very different. And there are 574 federally-recognized tribes, so you’re looking at a minimum of 574 ways of doing this work, and none of them are wrong. And it’s the institution, the museum, the agency that needs to adapt, and make consultation and the process meaningful, and hold space for all of the grief that comes with this process. Because every time we open consultation, every time we have these conversations, we are ripping open a band-aid. It’s a band-aid that’s been ripped open numerous times and there’s a lot of scar tissue there. There’s a lot of trauma that we’re bringing to the surface. And that’s something that’s often not discussed publicly and openly.
Miller: I was fascinated to see your own biography and to find out that you were a geriatric nurse. Then you went back to grad school – you became an anthropologist.
Alapisco: I actually started at the very beginning. I started at freshman level.
Miller: OK, but a major career change from a nurse to an anthropologist and human osteologist, someone who’s trained to identify and analyze human skeletal remains. Is there a connection between those two careers?
Alapisco: Oh, absolutely. I was doing the geriatric side. I was doing the hospice and palliative care, and I had an adult foster home. I was running adult foster homes and I had worked in nursing homes. And I think there is absolutely a connection, because death does not negate humanity and we need to remember that. We need to remember that these are ancestors. We all have our ancestors, right? But these are the ancestors that are of this land, and there are protocols of space and place that need to be followed. And that hasn’t been done. That’s not something that can really be legislated. That’s something that needs to come from an intrinsic value system.
So having had the nursing background and walking people through the process of transitioning, I think it made me much more empathetic. And being Indigenous myself, it definitely played into a lot of my own cultural background. So, I feel they are very, very related and it was basically the next evolution of my career path.
Miller: Dawn Marie Alapisco it was a pleasure talking with you. Thanks very much.
Alapisco: Thank you.
Miller: Dawn Marie Alapisco is the director of the NAGPRA Office within OSU’s Office of Institutional Diversity.
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