Learning to Listen, Learning to Ask: NAGPRA Compliance, Indigenous Environmental Justice, and Addressing Contamination in Museums

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Four Decades of NAGPRA, Part 1: Accomplishments and Challenges" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Despite the decades old regulatory requirement under NAGPRA for museums and institutions to report known hazards such as pesticides, very few policies or procedures exist that address hazards, or ensure that potential or remaining toxins not escape notice. Although guidelines and recommendations addressed the issue in the 1990s and early 2000s, the problem was largely forgotten until recently. We suggest another element, that of Tribal cultural knowledge, also be included in policies and guidelines regarding what are historically, overwhelmingly Western notions of toxicity. Contamination entails not only physical harm to items and individual organisms but may bring spiritual and relational harm to those interacting with contaminated items. Indigenous communities have spoken out about the lack of disclosure regarding pesticide use, however, cultural knowledge regarding the intersections between physical, spiritual, and interpersonal contamination and toxicity is rarely considered in policy, practice, or discourse. Although this broadly embodied issue at once ontological, epistemological, ethical, and axiological (relational) can be interpreted as overstepping NAGPRA statute and regulations, we argue that the legacy of contamination in museums and institutions is not only an environmental health issue but an Indigenous environmental justice and human rights issue that requires attention to complex cultural frameworks.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Four Decades of NAGPRA, Part 1: Accomplishments and Challenges

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52091