Federal funds have created incentives for institutions to hold on to ancestral remains, subverting the goals of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). (Via propublica)
that it has not repatriated the ancestral remains used in the studies because no tribes have formally claimed them under the law. Pueblo representatives have continued to visit the AMNH and meet with staff about its collection, the statement added.
subject to NAGPRA under a temporary policy that allows an exception for studies done with tribal consent. The university has acknowledged publicly that as a premier research institution, it long ignored the wishes of tribal communities while benefiting from collections of their ancestral remains amassed through excavations and donations.that would require institutions to halt research on Native American remains if requested by a tribe.
“There are a lot of folks who may see ancestors as being an open resource to do different types of DNA testing,” she said. “We recognize that there is an ethical obligation.”For nearly two centuries, museums and universities used science to justify building and keeping massive collections of Native American human remains.
Of the more than 150 ancestral remains from Chaco Canyon at the AMNH, Hrdlička helped unearth more than half, according to the museum’s inventory provided to the National Park Service under NAGPRA. “The whole concept of NAGPRA was to return these collections to tribes, so that they would have rights over them. They would be able to authorize or not authorize testing,” said Melanie O’Brien, manager of the National Park Service’s National NAGPRA Program. “But that didn’t happen.”
From the perspective of his culture, Koyiyumptewa said, samples extracted for DNA research and other studies still represent the remnants of a person and should be respected. “Even though the person may be deceased,” he said, “that small sample still has life.” For example, the AMNH declared its entire Chaco Canyon collection to be “culturally unidentifiable.” In federal records, the museum said that people’s migrations from the canyon in the 1300s to villages in Arizona and New Mexico where their descendants now live left gaps in archaeologists’ knowledge about the region.that because multiple tribes claimed ties to the canyon, institutions needed even more time than the park service had granted them to consult with the tribes.
The museum had granted Brenner Coltrain access to its collection on the condition that she share her findings with several tribes, including the Hopi, Pueblo of Acoma and Navajo Nation, according to her NSF research proposal. But another form of destructive analysis that involved examining the bone chemistry of 80 ancestors led Brenner Coltrain to what she considered a more noteworthy finding: Corn had become a staple in the region by roughly 2,400 years ago. Her final reports did not say whether she shared this information with the tribes as Harvard requested.
Next, he collaborated with researchers at Penn State, Harvard and the AMNH on a paper that again focused on the ancestors from Pueblo Bonito’s Room 33. Their work was supported by NSF funding. Using mtDNA, they showed that eight individuals buried together in the room descended from a woman laid to rest among them and that the group’s lineage spanned 300 years., the leading scientific journal.
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