"To many Native Americans, the collecting of their ancestors' bones and bodies by museums is a source of pain and humiliation—the last stage of a conquest that had already robbed them of their lands and destroyed their way of life."
Douglas J. Preston's article "Skeletons in Our Museums' Closets" in the February, 1989 issue of Harper's Magazine.

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Museums hold a staggering number of unearthed Native skeletons. Despite only composing 1% of the American population, 54.4% of the Smithsonian’s collection of 34,000 human specimens is made up of Native remains. African Americans amount to 5.1%, and whites 20%. [1] While the Smithsonian is one of the largest holdings of Native remains in the United States, the narratives of other museums are not far removed. How did these institutions end up with so many dead bodies, and what are they doing about it in the present? From the 1800s to the 1990s, uninformed misconceptions have dictated the scientific and popular American attitude toward Native remains. Inability to empathize with and understand Native perspectives has continued to shape modern legislation around bones, evidenced by the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which rearticulates the same bigoted assumptions found in the work of colonizers and scientists in the 18th and 19th centuries. These differences between law and indigenous reality leave current research institutions such as the Yale Peabody to navigate the delicate balance between academic inquiry and Native rights.

There are three fundamental misunderstandings of Native people that can be traced throughout American history. The first is a general perception of Natives as savage, and the elevation of scientific perspectives over Native perspectives and way of life. The second is the exoticization of Natives as if they are extinct animals or historical artifacts. The third is the forcing of the foreign, Eurocentric “property rights” idea into Native communities, causing detrimental land claim disputes and issues with ownership of remains. While not a summation of all misunderstandings between immigrated Americans and Native peoples, this paper seeks to connect and define common issues between the two groups through time in the context of Native remains, and highlight the areas where change in the academic approach to Indigenous communities is necessary in the present.

To begin, it's important to outline how Native remains ended up in collections in the first place. Armed forces and soldiers played a big role in grave disruption and remains collection. As troops surged westward in wars going as far back as the American Revolution, graves were destroyed to demonstrate a growing hate for Native people and the imperial English government, both of which stood in the way of expansion. [2] Colonial soldiers often collected Native heads to put on display as shows of their triumph. In 1676, after King Philip’s War, the Wampanoag chief Metacom’s head was put on a spike for display in Plymouth, Mass. [3] Later, in 1868, the drive to collect Native remains was made more explicit by officials like Madison Mills, the Surgeon General in the United States Army: “The Surgeon General is anxious that our collection of Indian crania, already quite large, should be made as complete as possible.” [4] He requested “specimens of rare animals, poisonous insects, and reptiles along with typical crania of Indian tribes.” [5] Mills was hoping to acquire more bodies for display in the Army Medical Museum collection, and his order led to the capture of 4,000 remains from hospitals, battlefields, and graves. [6] His grouping of human skulls with insects and other fauna shows how he saw Natives as no more than animals, their crania serving as artifacts to be put on display like any other.

Another motive for grave desecration was its ability to erase the tribal claim to land. During the War of 1812 and throughout the 19th century, western land expansion ideas were gaining popularity, and land debates between tribes and American officials were intensifying. [7] As the young Cherokee leader John Ross writes aptly to American expansionist Lewis Cass, Natives refused to “dispose of their heritage in the soil which moulders the bones of their ancestors.” [8] American officials remedied this obstacle to expansion by removing the bodies from the soil altogether, ostensibly nullifying the native claim to land. In traditional Native culture, a life centered around sharing land, property rights did not exist. [9] Forced assimilation of Indigenous tribes into Eurocentric standards put their land and remains at risk.

A third motive for grave looting was in the financial gain that resulted from popular demand for Native skulls. A 1982 New York Times article reads "Professional looters...work night and day at Indian burial sites in the Arizona desert...There are very few large sites in Arizona that have not been hit to some extent.” [10] Grave looting was incentivized with large sums of money for “prehistoric bodies”, up to $10,000. If remains were not sold to the government or museums as they were, they would be turned into ashtrays or candle holders for sale. [11] This complete dehumanization of the Native body, stretching in these examples from 1676 to 1982, shows the ways in which Native Americans and their stories have been exoticized and depersonalized throughout time.

In the mid-1800s, a new type of anthropological science developed that allowed scientists to further justify remains collection: craniology. Craniology was the study of skulls, often focusing on the variation between skulls of different races. From the birth of this scientific study, the prospect of discovering a biological difference that uncovered the assumed innate inferiority of the darker-skinned races drove its research. [12] One of the most well-known craniologists was Samuel George Morton. In Crania Americana (1839), Morton writes detailed descriptions of the intelligence, demeanor, and way of life of many different races on the American continent. Here, he describes the Appalachian branch of North American Natives: “In character these nations are warlike, cruel and unforgiving. They turn with aversion from the restraints of civilized life, and have made but trifling progress in mental culture or the useful arts.” [13] Not only does Morton dismiss Natives as savage, but he elevates the white colonial perspective over the native way of living, particularly in his critique of their aversion to the “restraints of civilized life” as he knows it. Morton’s observations are made more harmful to common perception of Natives in his juxtaposition of racist commentary with empirical scientific results. After measuring 256 skulls, Morton made a chart of different races and their approximated cranial size. [14]

Morton determined through his measurements that Native Americans had the smallest cranial circumferences, while Caucasians had the largest. 57% of all of his skulls were of Native American origin, a disproportionate amount in comparison with the other races in his collection. Morton’s focus on collecting Native crania more than other races shows the ways in which he perceived them differently, as something to be collected and studied rather than let rest. While Morton never explicitly made the racist correlation between cranial circumference and intelligence, that conclusion is inferred by the intellectual elite that reads his work, and some bridge that gap in their own writing.

Two of these men are Josiah Clark Nott and George Robins Gliddon, who in 1854 co-authored their book Types of Mankind with Morton after his death, borrowing lots of information from his Crania Americana and similar published works. They take a very explicit approach to the craniology question in their research: “The general law laid down by craniologists [is] that size of brain is a measure of intellect." [15] This conclusion permeated the world of craniology and anthropology until it was widely accepted, and the ideas in Morton’s work were used to justify racism and land expansion. Nott and Gliddon were so convinced of the racial inferiority idea that even when they saw contradictions in their own work, they dismissed them as anomalies:

The average volume of the brain in the Barbarous tribes is shown to be from 83 to 84 cubic inches, while that of the Mexicans is but 79, and in the Peruvians only 75, thus, exhibiting the apparent anomaly of barbarous and uncivilized tribes possessing larger brains than races capable of considerable progress in civilization. This discrepancy deserves more investigation than time permits at present. [16]

The continuation of backwards scientific study of craniology and racial theory, even when proven incorrect, shows the lengths these men would go to prove that Natives were innately less intelligent than Caucasians. If men like Nott, Gliddon, and Morton could distance themselves biologically and scientifically from Natives and other racial minority groups, they could further justify westward expansion as God’s will for the white race and find peace of mind in the idea that Natives are not at all related to whites. [17]

Morton theorized the reason for his discovered innate differences in the human origin story. He believed in polygenism, the idea that multiple different human ethnic groups appeared in different places in the world independent of each other. This contrasts the more radical Darwinian idea of monogenism, a theory that all humans developed from the same sole ancestors. If monogenism was correct, it would disprove the idea of innate racial differences. Morton did not believe that the environment played a role in the appearance or biological adaptations of different races. [18] Post-Morton, Darwinian ideas began to grow in popularity, and racial anthropologists needed new justifications for the biological differences they had perceived. One of these justifications can be found in a letter between Humboldt, the renowned French natural scientist, and Gliddon, appearing in the text of Types of Mankind: "it makes little difference whether the mental inferiority of the Negro, the Samoiyede, or the Indian, is natural or acquired; for, if they ever possessed equal intelligence with the Caucasian, they have lost it ; and if they never had it, they had nothing to lose." [19] Humboldt argues that whether polygenism or monogenism is correct does not matter because even if Darwin is right, Natives and other minorities are still clearly inferior to Europeans in other ways and do not compare to the intelligence and civilization of the Caucasian race. Once again, these scientists recognize the holes in their theories and circumvent them with more unproven racist observation.

Another one of the post-Darwin justifications for white superiority comes in the White Racial Dominance Theory. As Types of Mankind writes:

The Creator has implanted in this group of races [Caucasians] an instinct that, in spite of themselves, drives them through all difficulties, to carry out their great mission of civilizing the earth. It is not reason, or philanthropy, which urges them on ; but it is destiny. When we see great divisions of the human family increasing in numbers, spreading in all directions, encroaching by degrees upon all other races wherever they can live and prosper, and gradually supplanting inferior types, is it not reasonable to conclude that they are fulfilling a law of nature? [20]

Gliddon and Nott conclude that the continued expansion of the Caucasian race justifies its superiority in and of itself. They believe God’s divine will must be the driving force behind their prosperity, and even if Darwin’s theories are correct, Caucasian success in racial war must prove their biological greatness. This theory also softens the consciousness of the land expansionists in their displacement and mass killing with the idea that it was inevitable, ridding the individuals of any blame in their minds.

Land expansion confrontations come up again and again in Native history, and one of the main issues was the expansionists’ disregard for the way the Indigenous tribes had historically treated the land. Natives had no perception of the idea of private property, and due to language barriers and fundamental misunderstandings between the two groups about the way land should be treated, some tribes signed treaties early on without fully understanding what they were agreeing to. [21] The dissection and selling of Native land in the Dawes Act of 1887 is a clear example of the divide between Native and American society: the federal law forced Native families onto singular plots of land against their customs, and sold the remaining acres to white western expansionists, shrinking reservation lands by as much as 90 million acres once the Dawes Act was revoked in 1934. The same can be said for Indigenous remains: the idea that a person or institution can own another person’s remains is completely foreign to Native tradition. [22]

The three main themes of racist underwriting and misconceptions toward Native communities—the elevation of white perspective, the exoticizing of Natives and their remains, and dismissing of traditional land customs—all appear in the early acquiesce of remains and the intellectual debate surrounding it. Morton, Nott, Gliddon, and other anthropologists of this century characterize Natives as savage, and impose their own societal norms and standards upon them in order to judge their civility. They create justifications for white superiority based primarily on Christian religion, and use backward science to prove biased and harmful conclusions about Native intelligence. Those same craniologists, as well as men such as Surgeon General Mills, exoticize and dehumanize Natives in the incentivizing of grave pillaging and collecting, and large, disproportionate collections of Native crania demonstrate how they are treated with marked difference from other races. Eurocentric craze for land ownership and dismissing of the way Native communities historically ran their land led to the desecration of graves and relocation of tribes into plots and reservations, leaving large scars on indigenous sovereignty and identity and set the stage for land related repatriation issues in the modern sphere.

Push for the protection of native graves and the repatriation of remains from museums has existed within Native communities since the 1700s, but popular American sentiment did not take a strong stance for this movement until the mid 1980s. By 1980, private collectors, educational institutions, and the federal government held anywhere between three hundred thousand and 2.5 million remains, as well as other cultural artifacts. [23] One of the turning points toward change came in the form of a National Geographic article in 1989, titled “Who Owns Our Past?” The article detailed a 1987 case in Kentucky where a group of ten men paid a land-owner $10,000 to lease digging rights on their land. The men had prior knowledge of Indian remains and relics being found in the area, and tried their luck, digging over 450 small craters in the earth to excavate the old burial ground. [24]

The looters were motivated by the popular market that had developed at the time for old Native artifacts and skulls, and many of the unearthed remains were suspected of being showcased at an annual Indian relic show sale weeks later. [25] Miles Hart, the detective sergeant of the Kentucky State Police at the time, spoke of his initial reaction entering the field: "There were jawbones, leg bones, finger bones, human teeth everywhere. We got a cease and desist order until we could figure out which laws had been broken." [26] As it turned out, only one law had been broken under Kentucky state legislation. There was existing legal protection for graveyards, but it was based on traditional American Christian burial. Cemeteries were defined as having municipal dedication, underground interment, headstones, walls, and gates, all identifiers that traditional Native burials did not have, leaving them unprotected by law. [27] The men were charged with “desecration of a venerated object,” a violation punishable by $500 fine or one year in jail, and only applicable to those currently residing in Kentucky, which four of the ten men were not. Kentucky legislation later unanimously modified all grave desecration to felony status in 1988. [28]

Some were hopeful for stronger federal law implementation after the event: “Because of the scale of the Slack Farm operation and the diggers' brazen disregard for human sensibilities, we're hoping this case will spur a national burial preservation act,” [29] said David Wolf, a forensic anthropologist for the Kentucky medical examiner’s office. Wolf proved to be correct. An image of a protest outside a Kentucky hotel holding an Indian relic show was publicized in the same National Geographic article, demonstrating the shifting tides of public opinion toward regulation and justice for Native communities. [30] On July 10, 1990, a bill was introduced to the House regarding grave protection and repatriation of Native remains. On November 16, 1990, President George H.W. Bush signed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) into law. [31] NAGPRA provides federal protection for traditional Native burial, and “requires federal agencies and institutions that receive federal funds to repatriate or transfer Native American human remains and other cultural items to the appropriate parties.” [32] The law mandated institutions to report and categorize their holdings of Native artifacts and remains under given timelines, and is a large milestone in crucial legislation for Native American rights. [33]

While NAGPRA remains a powerful victory for the Native community, loopholes in its regulations remained that held stark similarities to the assumptions and racist underwriting that was seen through the 19th century. NAGPRA continually elevated scientific and Christian perspective over Native perspective. Traditionally, many Native cultures believe that the disruption of buried people awakens their spirits and causes them great unrest. The Navajo tribe writes that “Improper burial of a corpse, holding back belongings of the deceased ... disturbing or taking away from the grave parts of the earthly body or things buried with it ... may impel the ghost to return to claim belongings or to locate missing parts.” [34] Just like the traditional themes of American history, these religious beliefs were not honored by the legislation. If Indigenous tribes asked for the repatriation of remains or artifacts, the federally-funded agency would have had to comply unless the “items [were] indispensable for completion of a specific scientific study, the outcome of which would be of major benefit to the United States.” [35] NAGPRA did not define what “major benefit” meant in this context. Giving institutions what is essentially a free pass to override repatriation kept Native bodies perpetually in scientific collections. Scientists consider themselves the stewards of historical truth, and in their legislation, they trample on Native history and religion deemed invalid by the same standards their own could be. As Walter and Roger Echo-Hawk write:

The laws and social policy, to the extent they affect Native dead, do not treat this class of decedents as human, but rather define them as "non-renewable archaeological resources" to be treated like dinosaurs or snails, "federal property" to be used as chattels in the academic market-place, "pathological specimens" to be studied by those interested in racial biology, or simple "trophies or booty" to enrich private collectors. [36]

Scientists dehumanize and exoticize individuals by keeping them in collections, in the name of a “science” that individual never consented to being an object of study for. While the direct quotations Echo-Hawk mentions are not seen in the official NAGPRA legislation, the overall sentiment is one that reflects the spirit in which NAGPRA regulations were written, as well as the history of the treatment of Native remains that preceded them.

The story of Kennewick Man, a skeleton that became the center of a legal confrontation from 1996 to 2004, [37] presents another case where scientific perspectives were elevated over Native oral history. Kennewick man was a 9,000-year-old skeleton uncovered from a Washington State riverbed. Multiple tribes were calling for his repatriation based on geographical location and their own oral tradition, but eventually all of these historical proofs were dismissed as unfounded. [38] Despite NAGPRA’s extremely explicit statement in section 3005 part 4, reading Native American human remains and funerary objects shall be expeditiously returned where the requesting Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization can show cultural affiliation by a preponderance of the evidence based upon geographical, kinship, biological, archaeological, anthropological, linguistic, folkloric, oral traditional, historical, or other relevant information or expert opinion, [39] the Ninth Circuit determining Kennewick man’s repatriation held that:

“[Oral] traditions include myths that cannot be considered as if factual histories . . . and because the record as a whole does not show where historical fact ends and mythic tale begins, we do not think that the oral traditions . . . were adequate to show the required significant relationship of the Kennewick Man’s remains to the Tribal Claimants.” [40]

Due to lack of written language, all of Native heritage and history has been passed down by oral storytelling. Questioning the validity of this form of history questions all Native accounts of their own history. It is not proven that any one religious perspective is accurate or inaccurate, and the discounting of Native storytelling represents an elevation of science over Native history that has been seen for centuries. 

NAGPRA’s inability to recognize and address diverse land related problems revealed similar long-standing issues around Native remains. If graves were found in city-owned or privately-owned land that was not supported by federal funds, they did not have federal protection under NAGPRA. Under its “definitions” section, NAGPRA defined federal lands as “any land other than tribal lands which are controlled or owned by the United States.”[41] This definition became an issue when tribal burials were at risk of being uprooted for industrial developments. In 1999, the Western Mohegan Tribe fought the State of New York in an attempt to protect the development of a state park into a recreational area, claiming the park as an old tribal village and burial ground. The district court ruled in favor of the State, claiming that the tribal lands did not have protection under NAGPRA because the park was not federally funded.[42]

Another land-related issue seen in NAGPRA resides in remains found on reservation land. When remains are found on tribal lands, ownership is given to the tribe that owns that land, without consideration of the past occupants of that same land. As Kurt E. Dongoske writes in the American Indian Quarterly, “In the past, the Hopi Tribe actively maintained its stewardship over a far greater area than now currently comprises the Hopi Reservation. As a result of unilateral political actions by the United States Government, much of the Hopis' ancestral land claim is now contained within the jurisdiction of the Navajo Tribe.”[43] The American government forced Native communities into reservations that did not at all represent their original origin, causing rippling negative effects to modern affairs. Under this law, cultural artifacts and remains of Hopi origin that are found on the reservation will fall into the hands and will of a “culturally unrelated tribe.”[44] In disregarding Native land customs and origin even in remains repatriation, legislation continues to undermine traditional Indigenous identity and rights. As is verbalized in Native Americans and Archaeologists: Stepping Stones to Common Ground: “property law is, in many ways, completely unsuitable to address the legal rights of Indian people with regard to their ancestors.”[45]

Connecting the threads between initial taking of remains and the legislation regarding their return shows the ways in which Indigenous populations and their ideas have been relegated throughout time. Early anthropologists forced their own traditions and beliefs on Natives, deeming tribes uncivilized when they did not live up to biased standards, and using pseudoscience to prove racist suspicion. In 1990, modern scientific perspective was once again given higher standing than Native belief in the text of legislation and the courts where that legislation was enacted. Mass collection of Native remains from cases in the 1700s like Surgeon Mills to the 1980s with cases like Slack Farm show the continued exoticization of Native remains, and accentuate the way dead Indigenous bodies are stripped of their humanity. NAGPRA allowed institutions to perpetually hold Native remains if deemed important enough to scientific study, further placing Native bodies on the same level as animals. In the 1800s, Native land claims were not respected and tribal communities were forced to assimilate into money-based “property” ideals. 1990’s NAGPRA continued the tradition of not recognizing original Native land claims in its inability to recognize issues with reservation land and its protection of only federally funded areas. The similarities in approach to Native affairs 150 years apart reveal the need for change in the American mindset to give tribes the respect and national protection they deserve.

In January of 2024, in response to many of the previously outlined critiques, the Biden administration implemented new regulations to NAGPRA that increased pressure and shortened timelines for repatriation on institutions holding Native remains.[46] The Yale Peabody Museum in New Haven is currently navigating its own efforts to repatriate under NAGPRA. David Skelly, a Professor at Yale and the Director of the Museum, shed light on the difficulties the Peabody has had with repatriation in the past, and the ways Yale is trying to right past wrongs. Many of the remains that came into the Peabody’s holdings were through the state. Any time before approximately 1950, when Connecticut needed to build something and came across a Native burial, those remains would be sent to the Peabody. When they came across a Christian burial, those remains would be reinterred.[47] Skelly spoke about how he could not undo the past, and his only option is to move forward with repatriation and do the right thing in the present. He laments: “it feels like that was such a different time...I don’t understand what they were thinking.”[48]

The Peabody is maintaining an active effort to repatriate, and in response to heightened regulations, they have hired two more members to an official repatriation team.[49] However, getting remains back into the hands of tribes is not an easy endeavor. Skelly articulates: “I get the question quite often, well, why don't you just give all this stuff back?...believe me, if I had a magic button under here I could hit, I would do it.”[50] Unfortunately, repatriation has proved to not be that simple. In combination with logistical complications that take lots of time, Skelly expressed discontent with the NAGPRA regulations and their inability to aid non-federally recognized tribes. He mentioned how under NAGPRA, federally recognized tribes get to “call the shots in many cases,”[51] leaving at least 200 tribes that are not federally recognized without protection for their remains and any promise of repatriation.[52]

In response to this issue, Skelly described the importance of repatriating remains outside of NAGPRA and developing relationships with the tribes to come to agreements beyond the restrictions of the law. The Peabody has done multiple repatriations outside of North America in the past, and when asked whether the institution would continue giving back remains if NAGPRA regulations were loosened under the current administration, Skelly said: “Absolutely. Because again, it's not the text of the regulations that is the basis for a relationship. It’s a framework for some of our interactions, but not all of them.”[53] He mentioned a specific repatriation with the Mohican tribe that was not done within NAGPRA.[54] Because the museum had claimed the items were not sacred or ceremonial for decades, the repatriation got tied up in old legal issues, and the tribe agreed to do the repatriation outside of NAGPRA to avoid the complications.

In some cases, these active partnerships result in the continued display of artifacts. Skelly explains: “the right thing to do can also mean developing a partnership with the culture where they say, actually, you know, we could claim this, but we would rather have it here, and by the way, would you preferably uplifts tribes and continues to give them the respect they deserve, even when regulations complicate exchanges.”

In the madness of current political affairs, it is important to continue to pay attention to NAGPRA and its regulations, as well as the efforts academic institutions are making to repatriate and communicate with tribes. While NAGPRA of 1990 served as an important step in the right direction, it also illuminated the ways society was still stuck in a mindset of elevating the white perspective, exoticizing Native narratives, and not recognizing the traditional Native approach to land. Undermining past pervasive racist thought can only be done through vigilance and continued public action to preserve what’s right in the present. It is everyone’s duty to hear Native voices, respect them, understand them, and fight for them.