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The Good and The Bad of NAGPRA

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Once you’ve said it you can never take it back. Once you’ve done it you can’t change it.

Americans, not Native Americans, but the slightly newer, more imported variety, haven’t quite learned that lesson yet. So they run around trying to right the wrongs of their ancestors. And that is commendable – up to a certain point.

Archaeologists of the past – for the large part – were poorly trained. Amateurs with little regard for the rights of the dead and little respect for the wishes of any living ancestors. Many were treasure hunters–gold-diggers, at best. They managed to give the science of archaeology quite a bad name throughout the world.

Today, descendants of African-Americans who were held as slaves are receiving some reparations for crimes against their ancestors. These reparations are mostly monetary. A question of too little too late? The laws and practices that established slavery as an institution in this country are long gone – some of the mentality undoubtedly remains, but prejudice and feelings of superiority will likely never be wiped entirely away.

For descendants of Native Americans whose lands were violated by anthropologists and archaeologists, whose family graves were disturbed or destroyed, there is NAGPRA.

NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, was passed in 1990 to return some measure of control to the tribes whose ancestors and ancestral lands were in question. Some think NAGPRA did the job; some think it did not.

“I think most Americans (including Native Americans) thought what we were talking about were definite relatives and ancestors of modern Indian peoples,” wrote Dr. Robert York, archaeologist, in an article he co-authored with his wife, archaeologist Gigi York, called “The Bizarre World of Power Politics and America’s Past.” “In other words, to give American Indians the same rights taken for granted by other U.S. citizens in matters concerning their dead. But if one closely read the law one could see that it did not specifically say that, which left the door wide open for Native American claims to any pre-Columbus-contact human remains, regardless of age or demonstrable relationship to modern American Indians. This would be analogous to giving me the right to claim 70,000-year-old European Neanderthal burials as my direct ancestors simply because I am supposedly a ‘Native European’.”

NAGPRA is certainly having an effect on the way that archaeologists are doing their jobs. Considerations have to be made now in the planning stages for any NAGPRA issues that may arise, and steps taken to ensure that the tribes involved are treated fairly under the law.

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