Patriation: NAGPRA’s Regulations on Culturally Unidentifiable Human Remains, applied

Summary

In 2010, the promulgation of new regulations under 1990’s Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) threatened to upset the hard-won balance that had developed between the legitimate interests of descendant communities and the scientific and museum communities over the previous twenty years. Because the 10.11 rule broadly mandates the disposition of culturally unidentifiable human remains, many parties—including the Society for American Archaeology—reacted negatively, stating that the proposed and final versions of the regulations were unworkable and subverted NAGPRA’s original intent. This paper will use real-world examples to explore the degree to which those initial concerns have been realized in the 10.11 rule’s five first years. It will discuss how ambiguities in the regulation’s text, differing interpretations, inconsistencies in messaging by the National NAGPRA Program, and the contradictory objectives of the Act and regulations have affected NAGPRA implementation as a whole.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• NAGPRA Applied: Stories from the Field on its 25th Anniversary

Keywords

Spatial Coverage